


A Flower with Lavender Petals

by TheFlowerofAlbuquerque



Category: Actor RPF, American (US) Actor RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Actors, Classic Hollywood movies - Freeform, F/F, classic Hollywood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 18:48:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 19
Words: 48,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16898004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlowerofAlbuquerque/pseuds/TheFlowerofAlbuquerque
Summary: After shooting the concluding episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” now TV star, Vivian Vance, begins to rediscover the imperfect reality of her life, a reality she has spent her whole stage career trying to escape from. Reminiscing over the years of unsuspected success, a shining spot begins to come to focus, a love in the midsts of abuse and depression that Vivian never knew was there all along.  But when an unassuming stagehand saves Vivian from Co-star William Frawley, a long-restrained piece of her identity seems to dislodge itself into the light. Quickly, life begins to change for Vivian. Possibly, even, for the better.A collection of possibilities, A Flower with Lavender Petals tells the story of what might have been and a chance for happiness among the newspaper clippings of time.





	1. Author’s Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story of two women who fell in love nearly a decade before The Stonewall Riots; when the DSM-1 considered homosexuality a form of ‘Sexual deviation,’ and when public health advisory films were produced and used to warn parents about the homosexual pedophiles that circled their youth like sharks. At the time these people met, their love was considered a type of pathologic behavior equal to sexual sadism. This story is about a love that survived so that I and other queer beings could learn to love in safe spaces. 
> 
> Perhaps by legitimizing Queer presence in the past, we can actually rewrite the story of our existence.
> 
> I do not own I Love Lucy, it’s characters or plot.

**AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION:**

Most of the writers of the world fall into one of two categories: phenomenal authors who write about the mundane in life, and average authors who write about phenomenal things. Of the two, I fall into the latter category, a child with paints on my fingers and whimsy in my chest. Which should leave you high hopes not for my style of writing, expression, or verbiage, but rather for the story I attempt to capture with my basic language and vision. The picture I produce will be nothing more than a blaze of confused colors, a muddled attempt at grasping something vaporous and untouchable. But at least it is beautiful; a truly phenomenal story. And my cheap words will not cheapen the spirit of this tale, I think. 

This story is first and foremost fictitious; a tale as grandiose as the themes it yields significance from: love, lust, forgiveness, passion. It is fiction in the sense that you cannot, with evidence and testimony, prove any part of it fact. But fiction is not synonymous with irrelevance, and tombs are not empty if they hold memories of love or joy or pain. This story, if you choose to see it this way, is not unlike an empty tomb. There is no flesh and bone to cement meaning and significance to it, but if we so choose, it can represent the love and joy and pain of an entire lifetime. This story is like a tomb because it is truthful in the same ways that a gravestone is truthful about the life of the memories beneath it. The names, the places, the dates are accurate. But graves tell us more than that, don’t they? They tell us what and why and when to remember; in what direction the cold bones point and how we should interpret a life. And life is not so simple that “loving wife” or “selfless servant,” as we often see it carved in stone, could adequately define it, but these terms are truthful in the sense that they take a few moments from a life and tattoo them on the skins of our memory. They take what we should remember and make it impossible to forget. 

That is truth. 

And truth is different from fact. 

Truths are human enough that we remember them and, every once in a while, are in need of being reminded of; like a landmark one returns to on the many spiritual pilgrimages one takes in their life. And what does it matter whether something is true or false if it makes no grandiose dent in life?  _ We believe in gravity because we fall but we believe in stories such as these because we fall in love. _

So let us start here: With the understanding that this story is truthful and lovely. 

Again, like a children’s painting…


	2. The Last Episode

April 1, 1960, The Lucy-Desi Playhouse

It had been a long day, infinitely and painfully longer than any Vivian Vance had ever known. And she had known more than her share.   
It had started around 7:30 that morning, foggy and dark as the gravel moved at 50 miles per hour beneath her blue Cadillac frosted by early spring. Black coffee in hand and purse propped up in the passenger seat. Pills bouncing in their bottles in the fox fur bag. The sterling dials of the nearly untouched radio were fixed, fossilized, on a big band station, Glenn Miller’s orchestra greeting the morning with Moonlight Serenade. Vivian listened, but kept the dial low; the orchestra remaining at a soft pianissimo, low like the sun that stayed close to the cold earth.

  
But for the crisp frost holding the grass in place, this morning was overpoweringly alive, something Vivian couldn’t help but notice and analyze. It seemed ironic in all the best ways. She, hardly ever able to consider herself full of vitality, surrounded by soft, plump green. It hung over the wet country road, the leaves of the enlivened wood bulging with warmth and movement, fingering the lanes of gravely stone: life. The deep green of oak trees and the wedding-lace mimicry of the dogwoods made the early morning road like a cave of white and green glass; a home to fairies in Grimm’s Brother fables.

  
It all seemed so spiritual, so damn perfect. Typically living people weren’t the ones who saw such tranquility. Vivian checked her pulse. Thump, thump. Still here. But why?  
This drive was a nostalgic one, the concluding leg of a journey that had seemed so insignificant for so long. Now it was radically important. This was not the present, not the past. It was a radically small distance away from becoming a memory, time lingering in the tiny space between two door frames. Vivian would never again be on this fussy, gravel road, pass this delicatessen with its fresh pralines, this auto shop with the tires stacked like a WW2 rubber drive, for reasons other than speculative: to wonder at how things change even when we leave them be. She had been too oblivious to notice it then, that this world would slowly morph to one she would soon not recognize, but these seemingly unimportant things mattered to her now. She wanted to remember them.  
Vivian turned off Glenn Miller. Whatever it was, she wasn’t in the mood.

 

* * *

  
The sun had started to peak above the Culver City metro when the Cadillac paused at an intersection, then turned right onto W. Washington Blvd. and immediately left into the parking lot of DesiLu Studios. Vivian didn’t particularly like the new studio. The studio where I Love Lucy had finished its’ filming (846 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA) had been much less intimidating, as well as being the home of several familiar faces (Our Miss Brooks starring Viv’s old Vaudeville partner, Eve Arden, had filmed four seasons there, and just that day, deliberations for a potential upcoming show, The Andy Griffith Show to be exact, were underway at that very studio.)   
The Cadillac's gear made a grinding sound as it bumped up the pavement into the same parking space Vivian had always taken. The brakes, she noticed, in need of repair. Vivian only shrugged, turned off the motor. She saw no reason to make an appointment at an auto shop. As if this place, the studio, was the last place she would ever drive to. As if the car would sit forever in the spot she had just chosen. Would it? Vivian wondered. Deep down, She knew there was no part of her that desired to be anywhere else.   
Locking the Cadillac behind her, she scratched slowly up the pavement to the studio, purse, pills, and all. The commotion was obvious, stagehands whispering as she walked by, nodding in her direction like an acquaintance at a funeral. Vivian nodded back, smiled though she didn’t want to.

  
The cameras had clicked on and the doors had been opened, tart morning air fussing the props and scripts as the Ricardo household woke up with a clatter of cameras, cigarettes, and coffee. The light man was up in the dusty, metal rafters, the cameramen fidgeting the fabric cables to the three-camera system, four or five maintenance people crowding the donuts and coffee. On the stage, a synthetic day had been produced by stage lights and tissue paper backdrops. It always felt like a dream so early in the morning, a carnival funhouse painted in unrealistically bright hues for the eyes of the audience.

  
Slowly, cast members emerged from havoc, mugs and pen slashed scripts rolled tightly in clenched fingers as they maneuvered towards the stage to practice their walks, their talks, and their slapstick-style stunts. Vivian walked past, fingering the script in her coat pocket. She already knew every line, every shtick, every lowbrow insult she was to execute. Today, sticking to your lines was monumentally important. With emotions running high, the script would be a saving grace.

  
“You’re still not finished with the lights!” a voice bellowed up at the poor man up in the rafters.

  
“They’ll be ready when you start shooting!”

  
“They better!”

  
With this, Ms. Lucille Ball blazed her way into the studio, her red hair pulled back in a ribbon, a cigarette sitting between her tight lips. It’s time. It’s time. Go, go, go. the sharp click of her black flats said as she careened over maintenance men with coffee and donuts. Let’s finish this. I’ve got places to be, things to do. Don’t waste my time.  
Incandescent bulbs brightened, backdrops fell into place, furniture and props were situated. The poor lightman received a verbal thrashing as Lucille criticized his work. Wardrobe people began to scamper around with dresses and suits and ties and slacks. Max Factor makeup artists skipped through the havoc with paints and brushes. Vivian was cornered by a young brunette with an arsenal of eyeliner and powder. Her eyebrows were tweezed, her cheeks pinched, her eyes outlined intensely with flesh tones and mascara. Vivian listened from behind a powder brush as the audience funneled into the studio, corralled and directed to their seats. Cameras opened their rubber eyelids, film clicking like a metronome. Pretend, pretend, pretend, it whispered, nothing sad here. Keep smiling. Laughing, laughing, laughing.

  
Production started up as an efficient assembly line, the final episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour was underway and piecing together beautifully. Desi muddled his English on cue, Lucille cocked her eyebrows and shot insults (some of them unscripted and more bitter than usual. Many of them were taped over,) Vivian side-eyed Bill with true disdain and cuddled him with synthetic affection. The cameras rolled on through the day effortlessly and production was smooth. At least it was… until the final scene.

  
“Ms. Ball?” the associate producer interjected carelessly, “Ms. Ball, Do you have one more take in you?”

  
“Just shut up and film, Jack.” the redhead shut back.

  
Lucille was clinging to her husband, forcing the kiss that was needed to conclude the episode. When the associate producer yelled out cut, she shot back like a rubber band, pulling herself away from Desi. You could see it in her eyes: the rage that would let go to tears if not properly controlled. Let’s finish this. Let it end, end, end…

  
“Jack, can you give me that line one more time?”

  
“Sure, Desi: ‘From now on you can help me by not helping me.’ You got that, Desi?”

  
“Yes, Jack, I got it.”

“And Desi?”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Kiss her on the lips. The audience is used to it.”

“I thought on the cheek would…”

“Just do it, Desi,” Lucy whispered.

Desi nodded and obliged. The kiss was careful as if the two of them were delicately working around a scar, a bruise, something that needed to be left alone if it were to heal. They knew what this kiss was. They knew what they were saying to each other:

“Goodbye, Lucy Ricardo.” 

“Goodbye, you Cuban heel.” 

And Vivian couldn’t help the tears that slipped down her cheeks as she watched them passionately, hopelessly, and for the very last time as a married couple, lock lips.  
The final live audience Lucy, Ricky, Fred, Ethel, and Little Ricky were ever to see applauded and wept as the kiss concluded. They whistled and shouted, they sat motionlessly, they booed. They did everything people do when something is tragic and so damn sad. They knew it was truly the end of the Ricardos, the Mertzes. They knew that now these characters would exist only in conversations of great TV ventures, revolutionary comedy, studies in those who had been ‘beyond their time.’

  
There would be no more Fred and Ethel Mertz; no more staged congeniality Vivian and her co-star William Frawley. Vivian felt like letting out a sigh of relief as she stood there onstage thinking of all she had endured from Bill and how today, this day so black and white with conflict, it was all to end. Never would she see Bill again, she had decided this months ago.

  
And Vivian was glad. In a way…

  
Because not every part of this conclusion was sweet. As Vivian watched Lucille breakdown and pull away from her near ex-husband’s embrace, the air turned sour as curdled milk. No more Lucy and Ricky Ricardo? Vivian wondered, No more perfect family for Lucy, her stage sister and cautious confidant to pretend she had? Vivian was heartbroken at this for she knew an era was ending: the era of the grin-and-bear-it romance that was Desi and Lucille’s marriage. Now the two couldn’t even lie to the world with their acting.   
Even their fake marriage was over.

  
* * *

  
Not long after shooting had ended, Vivian allowed herself the chance to walk the dead stage, admiring the remains of the only part of her life that made sense.   
The sets from each rendition of the Ricardo’s life were still kept in this studio, right down to the Mertz-less pilot episode. There were the walls with their simple yet memorable paintings, the couches and beds that no one ever really relaxed on, the kitchen window Ethel had poked her birdish nose in at least once each episode to gawk at the splendor and audacity that was Lucy Ricardo. There were so many recklessly insignificant artifacts lying there: chairs, pictures, little chachkies like the ink blotter from one of the first I Love Lucy episodes and that cannon of a toaster that shot toast like musket balls. Vivian felt like gathering it all up in her arms and taking them home like orphaned children. For who did they belong to now? All of it going away, being taken in every sense of the word. And Vivian could do nothing but watch as the crew resumed teardown; her world struck down wall-by-wall and consumed by blackness; collapsing into heavy, heavy piles.

  
After a while, many of the stagehands cleared out for the night. Only a few hung back after work had finished laughing over a bottle of something someone had brought from home and play cards. Vivian sat on the now empty stage and watched as a game of poker as played, her feet knocking gently against the stage. She watched as a woman in a sleek, white button up slammed down an impressive hand; threw back two fingers of clear liquid and laughed musically.

  
“That’s how you play the game, boys.” and she whistled the tune to a Cole Porter song as she made her way to the stage doors, pulling a Philip Morris from the pack rolled in her shirt sleeve and setting it between her musical lips:  
Some get a kick from cocaine…  
I’m sure that if,  
I took even one sniff,  
That would bore me terrifically, too,  
Yet I get a kick out of you…

As more of the stagehands cleared out, the door to the writer’s office opened, the sagging frame scuffing against the floor. Out stepped Jess Oppenheimer, I Love Lucy’s head writer. 

Though Jess did not write the scripts for The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, he, Bod Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh had all joined the cast and crew on this monumental day, reliving the classic crusade of their comedic creations. And though Jess had left the show entirely, Bob and Madelyn had stayed on as script consultants.   
Jess Oppenheimer was an average looking middle-aged man with a halo of once thick, dark hair and a toothy smile. On days where he hadn’t gotten enough sleep (which was very often), his round, stubbled face often looked like it belonged to a bum rather than a successful comedy writer.   
Vivian had always liked Jess. Because when the business of entertainment moved at a backbreaking pace, where breathing, eating, and sleeping were in themselves challenging, Jess always found a way to smooth out production and reduce the friction of those feuds such as hers and Bill’s. He never played sides, however. Regardless of how many times Bill made nasty gestures or Vivian exploded in his face, Jess was calm. Much like a farmer, he liked to even out the shit.  
And he was an amazing writer, to say the least. I Love Lucy would never have been a success without him and Madelyn and Bob. Personally, Viv had never debated a rewrite of his. He had always written her character splendidly. 

And though he had created America’s most successful comedy to date, the man was as humble as Jesus and typically just as kind. And, to those who had seen him deal with Lucille Ball through the years of My Favorite Husband, he was a goddamn saint. Because Lucille demanded a lot from people, mostly because she demanded a lot from herself. And Jess had always seemed to rise to the occasion when she had become unreasonable, though never without landing a couple good blows to Ms. Ball’s ego. When Lucille would rush into the writer’s office, ready to fight with everything in her one of Jess’s rewrites, Jess would straighten up in his chair, tuck his two-inch pencil behind his ear and say:

“Whatever you say, Lucille, you write the scripts and next show, I get to be the star.”

“That’s ridiculous!” she would respond hotly.

Jess would lean forward easily in his chair and give the stringent redhead a grin, speaking softly, letting his words do the cutting for him,

“Only if you don’t think you have what it takes to be a comedy writer.”

If anyone other than Jess had ever said something like this to Lucille, they would have earned a violent stream of comments and several nasty insults. But Jess had earned the right, or perhaps, more accurately, the write to be respected by the fiery redhead. Because when you were as good a comedy writer as Jess Oppenheimer, you, as well as your work, demanded respect.

“Jess, Hi.” Vivian smiled softly at him as he made his way over to her, “Has everyone gone?”

Jess shook his head and sighed, “No, not everyone. The stagehands are tearing down and Madelyn and Bob stepped out for some chop suey but they’ll be back to clean out their things. I can imagine you’re eager to get home.”

Jess offered her his hand. Vivian took it and gingerly hopped from the stage.

“Not particularly. I don’t have anywhere to be.” She answered.

Jess looked down at her and grinned, “You mean you aren’t wanting to get out of this hellish hotbox?”

Vivian couldn’t help but smile at the way Jess used her own words against her sometimes. It was a quirky little trait of his, remembering something you said in passing and replanting it in a new conversation. Truthfully, Vivian found it rather charming. Vivian had remembered when she had used that term to describe the I Love Lucy studio when she had first seen it. Though Viv had been certain the Lucille was determined not to cast her because she didn’t look the part.

  
“I want a frump, a blondified, chubby woman with curlers, and cloth housecoat.” Lucille had commented, “That’s what I want.”

  
“Don’t be so sure you haven’t found her.” Viv replied, “Because I look a lot like that before I fix myself up each morning.”

  
Lucille laughed and then said, rather seriously, “Are you willing to take the part?”

  
“I am.” Viv shot back, chin up and eyes serious, “And if I have to work in this hellish hot box, you better make me the most popular skag on TV.”

  
Ever since then, Vivian had loved nearly everything about making the show.

  
Everything but watching it end.

  
Now, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Ever since Vivian’s divorce from her ex-husband, the stage actor Philip Ober, there hadn’t seemed to her much point in hurrying home, or anywhere for that matter. Over the past year the friends that Vivian had once considered her closest confidants revealed their true colors. Week by week, the people who had once claimed they would have done anything for her answered her phone calls awkwardly, admitting that they just didn’t feel comfortable sitting for coffee or catching a movie. Vivian tried to shrug off the constant rejections, pegging it on a conservative mindset. But all too quickly Vivian discovered that many of them were simply more inclined to accept a divorced man than a divorced woman. Philip remained a prominent social light in their friend circle, while Vivian retreated and dimmed. It had become rather lonely for Vivian and work had become her refuge.

  
But her refuge was being torn down, wall by wall, that very evening.

  
Vivian and Jess stood outside of the writer’s room for a while, not speaking. Without meaning to, Vivian’s eyes settled on the couch just inside the room, Desi numbly laying down on it. His eyes were shut but the twitch of his lips betrayed to anyone watching that his sleep was anything but restful. Vivian sighed, They had stopped shooting less than twenty minutes ago. Clearly, he had been drinking while they were shooting the last scenes.

  
Desi had always had a strict rule about being drunk in the studio. It was an especially important rule since two of the cast members were alcoholics. Now here he was stooped on this couch with its passé argil and dark coffee stains. Perhaps it was Desi’s narcissistic tendencies that lead him to enact such a rule in his studio when he himself was so bound to the stocks of whiskey and vodka. It was no secret that Desi was an arrogant and vain man, whose self-perception wasn’t helped by his good looks. Every week it seemed that a new girl had caught his eye and slowly nightclubs and women ravaged his mind… and his marriage. It was enough to make anyone feel they had a superior moral compass and many an article had bashed Desi’s reputation to dust over the news of the split of America’s most beloved married couple. All the headlines gave you the same thin half-truth: the divorce was Desi’s fault and Lucy had no choice but to leave him. He was cruel. He was evil. He was Cuban.

  
God, how idiotic could people become? As if Desi’s heritage made him any more prone to wander and wallow in drink. He was just a hurting man, that was all. And the cards had been stacked against him since day one. After losing a father so loved and fleeing a once peaceful home in Cuba, what else could he have done to numb the hurt?  
Vivian was no stranger to alcohol abuse. It was common in Vaudeville where she had gotten her start. It was clear that Desi had a disease. But if Lucille was willing to forgive him for it, well, the rest of the crew had found it in their heart as well. But the divorce papers had been drawn up long ago and even the most forgiving of hearts could bleed out. You never knew how much you could take till the one you've let into your life most hurts you; damages you beyond repair. Vivian understood what Lucille was going through. She wasn't sure if she could recover from her divorce either.

  
Awkwardly Vivian turned away and shook her head, stricken with the footage they had come up with that night, the emotion that was so obvious. It had taken them five tries to film the final scene of the episode. Every time Desi leaned in to kiss Lucy the mask of staged happiness would drop and all the couple could see was the inevitable end. Vivian had never seen Lucy cry so much and it was clear something had broken inside all who had been present that night and the audience was solemn as they left the playhouse.   
Vivian had watched all of this unfold from the background of the final scene. The background; that had always been where they had placed her… always a few inches from the spotlight; always the willing second fiddle. But Vivian often reminded herself that stardom was never what she had been after. Life was often cold for Hollywood’s stars, without authentic words or love. Even she struggled to believe that the words she heard from people off-set weren’t scripted and that life itself wasn't some sadistic sitcom; a comedy that tried to make light of life's most painful experiences.

  
Among this tattered, half-reality Vivian stewed: angry and devastated that this was over, disappointed with herself for caring so much. Vivian heard the studio settle; dry flecks of paint finally allowing themselves to peel away from the technicolor walls, floorboards that never dared to creek groaning with years of exhaustion. The stage lights wavered and finally dimmed; their bulbs hot and dry like a late August day, sparks like fireflies in sweet twilight. The doors in the back of the studio let in the April-sweet spring wind and the brittle paints and props whispered the old lines that had been said over and over and Vivian heard as the static that had been unceasing finally quieted; a new kind of loneliness to enter her mind and the ghostly laughter of a thousand jokes she had been the straight woman for coming to her… What a legacy, she thought, to be the brunt of the most well-written and raw cutting lines of the decade. How honorable it had been to be hurt in such a way.  
And somewhere in a forgotten corner, a Desilu camera stood silently in the empty space, forgetfully clicking onward and onward, recording seconds, minutes, hours of nothing at all. And, though no one could see them, the stars lingered over the studio like astronomical incandescent bulbs, pointing the world’s gaze to the studio where history had taken place; where some good, some bad, some unforgivable and undoable things had happened.

  
And were about to happen.

  
* * *

  
Jess walked Vivian to her dressing room and turned to face her as they reached the door,

  
“Vivian, I just need you to know… I know how hard this was for you, the character, the dynamic with Bill, everything. And I can promise you that you’re the only one who could have done this. Ethel Mertz is the ultimate testament to your talent.”

  
And he kissed her on the cheek.

  
“Take care, Viv,” he whispered, “The stage shouldn’t be the only place you find happiness.”

  
Vivian cried alone in her dressing room after Jess left her. She sat in front of her oversized makeup mirror, looking at herself, seeing a disheveled, crying woman look back. Was this really the end?

  
Vivian sighed as she turned to look at the room she had spent so many years in; the room where she had transformed into the sarcastic, ever committed, loving and downright crazy woman that was, and always would be, Ethel Mertz.

  
After a few nostalgic moments, Vivian heard a knock on her door. Oh, how she wanted to send whoever was on the other side of that door away. She couldn’t handle anyone seeing her cry. It was too hard; being vulnerable was something an actress couldn’t afford and Vivian had learned over the years how it was that one composed themselves in front of people in show business. But Vivian wiped her eyes and got up to answer the door, convincing herself it was just a fan who had managed to get in after tear down, maybe a young child who wanted good ol’ Ethel to sign their propeller hat and their Mickey Mouse autograph book. Not me, Vivian always wanted to say, Ethel Mertz isn’t real and she’s not me. But how could she say that to a child? So Vivian threw on her best ‘Hi, Lucy! Got any new ideas?’ face she could and walked to the door.   
But as Vivian opened it her mouth fell open.

  
Bill?

Yes, It was William Frawley her co-star. What was he doing here? Vivian wondered. Was he here to say goodbye to her? Bid farewell to the woman who played his wisecracking, devoted wife for nearly a decade? It was quite unlikely. After all, it was no secret that the two of them hated each other.

  
“What do you want?” Vivian asked without concern for her tone.

  
Bill just laughed. It wasn't a normal laugh and Vivian’s brow furrowed as she heard it. It was a pained laugh. It was slurred and overlapping. Bill took a few steps closer and Vivian began to sense the liqueur in his veins. She could smell him. He was incredibly drunk. Vivian rubbed her temples and pushed her anger aside.

  
“Bill, do you need a ride home?” She asked him softly.

  
Bill laughed again drunkenly and pushed his way into the dressing room. Vivian stepped back but Bill kept approaching her. 

“Bill. Bill, what do you want?”

  
Bill paused for a moment, leaning against the wall of her dressing room and taking a scotch bottle from his inside coat pocket. Vivian took a moment to look him over. Bill was still wearing brown tweed slacks and matching jacket and shirt. He wore a baby blue checkered tie that he had loosened from his neck. It now hung lazily on his chest with the buttons he had undone on his shirt. There were greasy fingerprints on his shirt. Bill wore a hat that was crushed and misshapen and his face was covered in sweat and ghastly pale. Vivian was shocked. She had seen people drunk hundred of times but never to this extent. Vivian swallowed hard.

  
“Bill? Bill, are you alright? I... I think I need to take you home.”

  
It wasn’t beyond Vivian’s reasoning at this point that Bill might be experiencing alcohol poisoning. If this were the case, he would have to get to a hospital right away. Jess had left to meet Bob and Madelyn for chop suey and the stagehands had cleared out with their liquor and cards over an hour ago. She was the only one who could even be sober enough to drive among them anyway. Vivian grabbed the keys to her Cadillac and turned to Bill, who still stood unmoving in her doorway.

  
Vivian approached him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  
“Bill, I’m taking you to the hospital. You need help and I’m worried you have alcohol poisoning. Come on, I’ll drive you there.”

  
Bill looked down at Vivian slowly and smiled. He began to laugh again and Vivian tried her best to lead him out of the dressing room.

  
“Bill, we need to leave. Please. You aren’t well.”

  
Bill just kept pushing himself closer to her and the two of them kept moving further and further into the dressing room.

  
“Bill, Please!”

  
“Shut up, cunt.” Bill slurred.

  
Bill reached out and touched Vivian's cheeks. Vivian resisted to urge to push him away and simply removed his hands. He doesn’t mean any of it, Viv reminded herself, he’s off his head with scotch.

  
Vivian gasped as Bill's arms wrapped around her waist. She felt everything at that moment: anger, hatred, disgust, fear. Immediately she placed her hands on his arms, trying to push him back. Bill paid no attention, he stared into her eyes with a look that communicated hate and lust to Vivian all at the same time. In moments he had Vivian pressed up against the wall, her arms pressed against the plaster.

  
“Let go! Stop it!” Vivian screamed.

  
Bill was drunk, there was no doubt about that. He was a raging alcoholic throughout the course of the show. Why would he stop now? But being understanding as she was; aware that yelling would only make the mix of alcohol and blood within him beat faster, Vivian changed her tone.

  
“Bill, stop this.” She whispered while looking into his drunken eyes, “You’re... you’re very sick and you need to go to the hospital.”

  
But before Vivian could react she felt his lips smash against hers.

  
Vivian gasped. She started to push back harder, her hands pressed against his chest, but his grip tightened around her hips. Her mind started to swim with adrenalin; her entire body saying no! No! No! This was wrong. It was so wrong. This man hated her! She managed to pull her mouth free.

  
“Stop, we can’t do this!” Vivian yelled.

  
Sudden anger flashed over Bill’s face; his cheeks gaining some of their color back.

  
“You told them I was an old man, old enough to be your father! You called me a drunken has been!” He slurred.

  
And then his eyes darkened, “Maybe I can dull those thoughts with this.”

  
Bill pushed a finger into his chest, where his scotch hid in his coat pocket,

  
“But sometimes, I need the touch of a broad, even one as ugly as you.”

  
Bill’s voice dimmed and his head tilted closer, a single finger tracing down her neck.

  
Vivian was terrified. She was furious. God, she didn’t know what she was. She just knew that she had to get away from him. She knew Bill was far stronger than her. But the liqueur Vivian smelled on him gave her some hope that if she calmed down she could make a run for it.

  
So Vivian just stood there, her body wrapped up in the huge arms of a man she hated. She looked up into Bill’s eyes. His pupils were dilated; fuming with drunken emotion. Lust. It was lust. He was burning her up with the look in his eyes. Vivian couldn’t help but shudder.

  
“Let. Go. Bill.” She bit out against the gnawing fear in her stomach.

  
Vivian slowly moved her hands to his, trying to softly pry his fingers from her.

  
Bill pulled away, meeting Vivian’s gaze. His eyes showed a mixture of pleasure and confusion. It was then that it occurred to Vivian: this would have happened regardless of her compliance.

  
With all the coordination Bill’s drunken fingers could muster, he grasped on to the zipper of Vivian's dress and began to pull.

  
“No!!” Vivian screamed.

  
She began to thrash but Bill pinned her arms to the wall of the dressing room. She gasped as the air was knocked from her lungs. Bill began to kiss her neck harshly.

  
“Bill, please.” Vivian whimpered.

  
Tears began to stream down her face. She couldn't move. Sensing that Vivian had given up fighting Bill removed one of his hands from her own, using it to cup one of her breasts, his other to trail his way down her thigh; fingertips scraping her skin when they reached the end of her skirts. Vivian started to cry harder.

  
“Help!!!”

  
And that's when it happened…

  
Bill’s fist, like a hunk of frozen meat, slung through the thick air and hit Vivian in the side of the head. It wasn't a clean hit. Vivian had seen his movements and had twisted away just in time. But even so, darkness was clawing at her.

  
The hit knocked Vivian to the dressing room floor. The contact was like slamming into solid ice. She rolled her head side to side, coughing and sobbing; tasting blood.   
Before Vivian could recover, Bill fell upon her, his shaking hands groping, burning her skin. His fingers were like matches; her skin warped by the hellish heat of his fat mits.   
Bill, still shaking and faint; but furiously determined, slid his frame down Vivian. She felt his palm on her thigh, the shifting of fabric as her skirts went higher.  
He's going to kill me, Vivian thought, Dear God, let him kill me when he's done with me...

  
Suddenly the door to Vivian's dressing room was thrown open; a dark and shadowed figure standing in the frame. It was a woman.

  
“Don't touch her.”

  
The voice was cool, dark and slow like the flow of water beginning to freeze. Bill ignored her. Vivian tried to pull herself up.

  
“I said don't touch her!”

  
The woman ran to Bill and, pulling him up by the collar, hit him square in the jaw. Bill immediately became limp. Blood started running down his face and suit. With his eyes closed, Bill looked to be nothing more than a hurt child. The woman stared at him; stared at him and shook him hard till he opened his eyes again. She stared into his drunken eyes, her arm still cocked. Suddenly her eyes met Vivian's and her gaze softened.

  
Vivian had involuntarily inched backward. She was now pressed against the wall. Her legs shook and there was something resonating of a collapsing building in the way she trembled. Her very foundation of self had been compromised.

  
The woman looked down at Vivian, who finally took the opportunity to meet her savior’s gaze.

  
She was dark, with thick dreadlocks that hung like a waterfall around her shoulders. She was built like how one might imagine a female boxer; thicker arms and tight calf muscles you noticed through her trousers. She was stout but comely. And for all her masculine qualities her face was soft and womanly. Her cheeks had the faintest cherry flush that warmed her features. Her lips were full and dark. And her eyes... ember and beautiful, were staring down at Vivian with concern. The woman set Bill down and crouched beside her.

  
“I won't touch you if you can't bare it.” the woman whispered, “But all I want is to help you.”

  
Vivian couldn’t speak, but after a few moments felt the woman’s warm arms place themselves beneath her neck and thighs. She smelled like stage paint and sawdust; soft light and pine trees. After carrying Vivian out of the stage area, Vivian’s fingers clenched.

  
“Wait.” Vivian whispered, “Please, no one can see… No one can see me like this.”

  
“There, there.” The woman whispered, not even flinching as Vivian’s fingernails made a small collection of crescent moons on the woman’s skin, “Everyone has left. No one will see you.”

  
And somehow Vivian knew she believed those words; believed every sound warmly shifting in the woman’s throat. Why? And did it matter that she understood?

  
Outside the studio, night in California loomed like a wolf; stars like fangs bared and grey, piercing eye of rock hanging there in the sky. Stars danced on the wet concrete. The moon’s eye shed light on the corners of the lot outside, the dirty parking lot with one car; Vivian’s blue Cadillac, sitting cold and shiny like an aqua fish in a black sea.  
Gingerly the woman carried Vivian towards the Cadillac and carefully leaned Vivian against the door of the car.

The woman stuck out her hand, palm up. 

“Let me drive you home.” 

It was an offer and a command all in the same shifting syllables and Vivian looked at the woman, who took on a new hue in the night atmosphere. Her skin was a dark violet, hand stretched out like a vine in an ancient forest, shadowy in the dim streetlights. Her upturned palm stared Vivian in the face, porcelain there and crimson and dark on the marge of her hand and beginnings of her wrist. Vivian looked at the hand, then back at the woman’s face, communicating without words was shameful to speak. The woman took back her hand slowly, gracefully, and said, only:

  
“I understand.”

  
And Vivian didn’t know what to think.

  
The woman then walked to the street and signaled for a cab. The first two sped past. The third finally slowed. The woman leaned into the cab slightly, peeling back bills carefully as if she were paying for a cab ride for the Queen of England; a shipment of fine China. After a few moments, the woman walked back to Vivian.

  
“He’ll take you wherever you say.”

  
Vivian didn’t speak, but simply let the woman pick her up again and carry her to the cab. As she set Vivian inside, Vivian’s grip on the woman tightened.

  
“Wait…” Vivian whispered, “Your name? Please…”

  
“Shay. Shay Dawson.”

  
The woman shut the door behind Vivian, gave one more empathetic and surprisingly sincere glance at her before stepping away from the curb. The last look she got of the woman, she was lighting a cigarette and pulsing in the amber warmth of it. And then she was gone, walking out and blending into the night like a white fox in Antarctica.

  
“Where to?”

  
Vivian looked at the cab driver and felt cold. The man spoke like a bartender after hours; a man with no life but every intention of making it appear to those who dared ask for a ride as if he had a family, a wife, a reason for his coldness, waiting.

  
Where to?: It was a script-like question, and Vivian answered him like she would an extra in a stage production. She didn’t know this man. And he didn’t know how to properly deliver his lines… Not after the scene that this interaction followed. The director would have smashed his efforts and told him he lacked the proper emotion. “Don't you know who you are speaking to? Don't you know what this character has faced?” But there was no director to scold him. The cab driver didn't know how misplaced his tone was... not at all. And why would he? The world was dark. A night shift cab driver knew that better than anyone. And Vivian was sure this was not the first time a woman had stumbled into his cab banged up and regretful. Yes, the cab driver would know better than anyone how the city worked. He was the garbage man of the human soul, collecting all the embarrassments, passionate drunks, and dumping them back at hotels and flats. The drunkards, the banged-up girls, the businessman taking his drunken, slurring party acquaintance to a hotel to get what he came tonight looking for. The cab driver knew exactly what had happened. How could he not? And his coldness was evidence enough that he could care less what had happened before she got into his cab, just as long as he was paid before she got out.

  
Vivian gave him the address and shut her eyes. The car rolled out of the parking lot and the movement began to sicken her insides. The cab slid up to an intersection and was accosted by a group of young boys with raw eggs, the yolks slamming against the windows, making Viv jump.

“Damn kids!” the driver shouted and slammed the breaks as the kids swerved off on their banana seats.

“You’d think they’d know when to quit.” he huffed, “Day ends in thirty-five minutes.”

And that’s when Vivian realized:

Today was April Fools Day.

* * *

Vivian didn’t turn around when she shut the door to the cab and felt herself washed over with cool midnight. She didn't watch the cab leave, didn't check the seat to make sure she hadn't left any of her things. And thanking the cab driver for remaining silent would have felt wrong, too. Silence was the only conclusion to the ride Vivian could think of.  
As Vivian pulled herself from the cab, shutting the door with shaking hand, the neighborhood stirred. A dog barked and then howled, a distant and muffled sound that made her jump. Lights snapped on in a few houses, followed by investigatory scans through blinded windows. And somewhere a radio station poured from an open window and Benny Goodman serenaded the shingled rooftops.

  
Vivian looked down at the dark pavement she stood on, hearing the abused motor of the cab growling and pushing into the darkness of the night; carrying with it some, but not nearly enough of the night’s wretchedness and pain.

  
The concrete below Vivian was cold and damp and the rain that had fallen reflected the warm lights of the other houses on the street. None from her’s. The empty darkness of the nearest puddle told Vivian that Philip wasn’t home. A silent prayer of thanks left her lips at this and after a few moments, she began to walk shakily toward the house.  
Safely inside, Vivian willed herself up the stairs to the bedroom, collapsing to a crawl as the weight of her own body’s sins began to feel like too much. What a horrid feeling, her mind’s eye observed, to think that everything must be her fault: Her fault for wanting to feel beautiful, her fault for letting herself sit alone and be vulnerable, her fault for shooting insults at a brute so previously unassuming. Always her fault. But Vivian pushed this thought back underground, deep inside herself where it’s roots could spread in silence. Because tonight, self-hatred felt like too much.

  
As her knees came up one stair at a time, none of the stairs in the house creaked. It was silent; as if no one else had ever even taken a breath in the house, touched it or slept in it. It was big and empty and echoed. But the stairs didn’t creak. Like marbles rolling around in an empty box, Philip and Vivian had not changed the house at all by their presence. Like pseudo souls, they somehow didn’t seem to really exist here.

  
After falling to the bedroom floor, Vivian finally noticed that her left shoe had been lost in the events of the night. Shakily, she bent down slowly; ran her hands over the nylons as she crouched and felt the fresh tears in them. She undid the latch on her right flat and slipped it from her heel.  
After falling into bed, Vivian felt the door downstairs open; heard Philip walk casually up the stairs that she had just slunk over. He walked into the master bathroom without a glance. She heard the sink; his shaving.

  
Fuck him.

  
The mattress shook as he fell in beside her. His hand reached out touching her hip and Vivian wanted to cry. He pulled himself forward, upon his shoulder, and leaned over her to look at her face. She shut her eyes; shut them so fucking tight. His hand lingered, sucking the breath from her lungs, causing bile to rise in her throat still sore from screams. He padded his way up her, feeling the secretly bruised side, the sore and beaten shoulder. Suddenly Philip leaned over to his side again, his hand removed from her.

As Philip snored beside her, Vivian struggled to escape.


	3. An Invitation

April 5, 1960, The Lucy-Desi Playhouse

The next collection of sunrises and sunsets passed without reason to. The world moved with unnecessary speed, an endless spin of doing and going and no-time-for-rest motion that was gut-wrenchingly rapid. A chatter of offices and a screeching of brakes and a slamming down of money on counters happened as the work week clapped itself together between Sunday and Sunday. There were still bills that found their way under doors like black smoke, the sign that something was not to last much longer. Still, subway cars moved with men and women and monsters and saints aboard them. A cab driver yelled out his window at a man in the street. The man yelled back. A horn yelled above both of them, a gunshot above the horn. The world didn’t have the decency to stop. Not even for a moment. No one paused long enough to notice that one of their own had fallen behind, fallen off the rollercoaster of life while everyone else, with their bodies moving and their mouths open, rushed onward towards the end of the ride. Crumpled and bruised and still, one passenger lay outside the field of daily motion. It was like sitting in a theater with the whole world on stage, a billion characters living a billion lives, and you the single, uninvolved spectator, unable to take your place on the stage amongst the motion of the living.

  
For every touch of Bill’s hands upon her skin, an hour would Vivian lay motionless upon the silk bed that might as well have been made of nails. For each hot exhalation against the skin of her neck, her thighs; a thousand wincing seconds. A small, tender voice had convinced Vivian to shower, once, but immediately after she collapsed into bed, wet and cold and naked; still shivering like a sapling in a high wind. She had not slept but starred in a deadish way at a crack in the ceiling so faint that no other time would she ever have noticed it. Nor had Philip attempted to touch her since that fateful night. He had simply grunted his hellos and goodbyes in her direction, shaving and dressing in the guest bathroom as well as sleeping in the spare room. He knew. But to what extent, Vivian wasn’t sure.

  
It is hard to say exactly when Vivian found within herself the strength to stand. Only that, miraculously, she did and immediately called a cab to go back to the studio. And even as she felt the knotting tension in her stomach and the bile rise in her throat, she couldn’t help but feel that it was necessary to return to the playhouse. Even after what Bill had done, she had to face that place.

  
She would not let him take away everything from her.

  
As the cab slowed in front of the playhouse, there was a scuttle like beetles through the grass; ants upon a fat slice of watermelon. Stagehands moved here, there, carrying props two times their size and passing them to other men as, down a tight line, props were tossed gracelessly into a large moving truck. Stage walls, couches, chairs, paintings, typewriters, incandescent lights were being shoved into the mouth of the truck’s bed without care.

  
Vivian watched, and couldn’t help but think about the burning of Rome. A TV empire, a sentimental history and conquering conquest for success was being ripped apart and scrapped. And none of the men throwing those softly worn items into the truck gave a damn. All of them moved quickly, efficiently, as if hoping to make room for the next legacy of human creativity to come crashing in at any moment to swallow up the old playhouse and spit out anything that had belonged to I Love Lucy. Because it was now outdated, tacked down to a decade gone.

  
Vivian got out of the cab and stood, watching, not daring to approach the chaos and destruction happening around the playhouse. She scanned the working men carefully, hoping to pull from the dirty bodies a single face. She looked down the line of sweating stage men, down on the farthest end of the wall where a few men were taking drags on cigarettes, up by the front of the truck where a man in a blue jumper leaned against the old truck, waiting patiently for the men to load the remaining props.

  
It took Vivian a few moments to notice a soft shadow of a movement against the nearest wall of the playhouse, the wall protected from the sun and colored deep maroon. There, a soft arm extended out and in, out and in, as a small amber light lit and died a thousand times.

  
There, a silver flame of cigarette against her tongue, was Shay Dawson, the woman that, even in the dirty chaos around her, held herself like a greek goddess and leaned elegantly against the bricks.

  
Vivian watched her silently, not yet daring to approach her. She couldn’t help but be mystified by the woman standing there. She was a complete stranger. And yet she had fought, punched, bared her teeth, and stood between herself and a drunk brute twice her size and at least that much her strength.

  
Don’t think of him, Vivian told herself, It’s over…

  
But that was impossible, as impossible as it had been for her to avoid looking in a mirror the morning after she had been attacked. She had stood there, preparing to take off her clothes to shower, and had pleaded with herself not to look, not to allow the extent of the damage to become known to her. Instinctively, Vivian had reached out and touched the glass of the bathroom mirror. It was cold on her fingers…

  
Dark lines ran down her cheeks; the dry remnants of her tears, her mascara muddled around her eyes. Her lipstick, what was left of it, was like a slash of red paint across her chin. Her neck was bruised, tiny black pebbles of color that polka-dotted the skin. There were scratches, red lines the ran lightly down each arm where Bill’s fingernails had sunk into her arms, purple fingerprints and black crescent moons where he had forced a constellation upon a flesh sky. The crowning feature of the night was, however, the intensely colorful bruise that covered her left eye. It was like a beacon of her trauma, the ominous black hole in a silent and trembling galaxy that sucked anything that had mattered before Bill into an oblivion: the coffee cold on the counter, the stray cat yowling to be fed, birthday cards in gold and yellow. These no longer mattered. For Vivian’s gateway to the world… the light with which to see life, her eyes, because of Bill, would never look at the world the same.

  
Vivian couldn’t speak, couldn’t even verbalize the disgust she felt looking at that image of herself. No amount of stage makeup could ever hide this, she thought. No cheap smile would ever convince the audience of anything other than this horror should the world discover what had happened to her. Where was the flower of Albuquerque now? She had wondered silently, stripped of her petals and crushed in a meaty fist.

  
Vivian had thought how different it felt to see herself like that, so positively ragged and welted. Most days, the only thing she didn’t like about her reflection was her crow’s feet. “You can’t lose true beauty.” Vivian whispered to herself on those days when the skin looked parched around her eyes, “Even the Mona Lisa cracks.”

  
But as Vivian had touched the discolored skin around her eye, she couldn’t help but remember what Lucille had said to her the last time Philip had beat her and Vivian had come into work with a black eye. Lucille had tracked her down immediately.

  
“Why do you stand for it, Viv? Why?” She asked, her words as fiery as her roots.

  
Vivian couldn’t answer her, she simply cleared her throat, skimmed the script that she already knew backward and forwards.

  
“If you don’t divorce that man,” Lucille said as she turned away, “than I will.”

  
Vivian had watched Lucille walk away then, wishing with everything in her that she could throw her arms around her, cry on her shoulder, spilling all of the pain and secrets and hurt she had lived with for so long, speak to her as if she really were that stupid, fat landlady that Lucy Ricardo seemed to love so dearly. Instead, she was flagged into the writers’ office by Jess, where she sat in the corner, her head down to conceal the bruises from him and the other two writers.

“What is it?” Vivian asked as she sat down.

“Vivian, there’s been a change…”

“Change? Change in what?” Vivian asked.

“In the script. We… We added a gimmick, something we’ve never tried before.”

Vivian raised her eyes at this, exposing the discolored skin. Jess didn’t even blink; Bob looked away. Madelyn closed her eyes and sucked in a breath quietly. 

Vivian straightened, “Well?”

“Well,” Jess began, “The gimmick requires you to be… rather close to Mr. Frawley.”

Vivian tilted her head forward.

“How close?” She asked seriously.

Jess looked back at the other two writers. Neither one of them would make eye contact.

“Well, you’ll be tied together, sort of, both wearing the same coat.”

Vivian could have screamed when Jess said this. But she kept her composer and simply marched on to the set with her bruised cheek in plain sight. A few moments before they started recording, a Max Factor makeup artist dragged her in back to fix her up. And then the theme song, she was on! 

“Yoo-hoo!” Vivian announced her entrance with fake bubbliness.

Lucy Ricardo fluttered theatrically and executed her lines perfectly:

“There’s one of the lovebirds now!”

To which Ricky Ricardo countered:

“Yeah, before the evening is over there'll be feathers flying all over the place.”

  
The audience released the first round of laughter, the sound pinging like pebbles upon the plywood stage.

  
“Oh, now, stop.” Lucy scolded him playfully.

  
Stage Right, Vivian excited herself and became what was wanted. She breathed.

  
Hi, Lucy!  
Hi, Ethel!  
Hi, Ricky!

  
It was all a lie; sold as beautiful truths.

  
The scenes moved along like a recurring dream; everything familiar and exotic all at once. The stage lights burned, singeing eyebrows, foreheads. The makeup caked and hardened, sweat tightening around your eyes and arms.

  
“Oh! Ethel,” Lucy yelled, “what happened?”

  
Ethel eyed her co-star and delivered her lines with pure emotion, “He pushed me off the bench, that's what happened!”

  
“I did not. She fell off.” Bill countered.

  
Vivian pulled each word, stretched and wrung them out to get the most out of her line, “Oooh, that does it! Roast beef or no roast beef, I'm leaving!”

  
“Don't bother, I'll go!”

  
Lucy, always the goalkeeper in these showdowns, interjected.

  
“Oh, you don't have to go, Ethel.” she begged, “Ethel, please!”

‘Ethel’ held her ground.

Lucy looked at her husband in mock defeat, “Ricky, I guess this was a bad idea of mine. Let's get their coats.”

Now for the real fun, Vivian thought.

Lucy and Ricky fumbled with the coats and used one of them to tie ‘Fred’ and ‘Ethel’ together! The crowd roared with laughter. But if someone had looked, really looked, they would have seen the millisecond break in character, the tiny twinge of truth that escaped. For one moment, it was not Ethel Mertz on that stage: it was Vivian.

“Lucy, let me out of here.” Vivian cried out angrily. 

“Not until you kiss and makeup.”

Immediately, Bill and Viv began bickering like children. Getting caught up in how authentic the argument felt, the scene stretched on a little longer than it meant to before concluding with the synthetic sweetness of an airy kiss. 

“You know, this is pretty sickening.” Ricky Ricardo commented.

You’re telling me, Vivian thought.

After shooting was done, Vivian returned to her dressing room to find a stagehand lingering by the door. 

“You twisted your ankle.” the dark woman spoke, looking down at the ankle Vivian wobbled on.

Vivian looked at the woman who wore a tie, kelly green. Her concrete grey dress shirt was rolled up at the elbows. Vivian caught herself looking too long.

“Tripped during one of the gages, where Bill pushed me from the bench.” she looked down at the swollen ankle. “I didn’t think it would swell so soon. I’ll be okay.”

“Let me get you ice at least.”

Before Vivian could object the woman had disappeared down the hall, returning a few moments later with a towel and a bag of ice from the icebox. Before Vivian could refuse, the woman had knelt and placed the ice against her aching ankle. Vivian winced. 

The two women shared an awkward moment of silence, the only sound the crackling of ice in the plastic.

“You don’t have to stand for that.” the woman whispered.

“Stand for what?”

The woman looked up at Vivian, her eyes filled with concern,

“You know he didn’t have to push you that hard. And the scene with the coat… I could see your eyes… You hide it well but still. I could tell you weren’t fine with it.”

Vivian didn’t know what to say, she especially didn't know why this woman had noticed her discomfort… or cared. 

“It’s over now,” Viv said flatly. 

The two women were silent awhile, the crisp motion of the toweled ice the only sound.

“I saw you.” the woman finally whispered.

“What?” Vivian asked.

“Indiana, The Voice of the turtle. That play you were in a little while before this.” the woman’s lips turned up into an awkward, crooked smile, “You’re beautiful.”

“You mean I was beautiful.”

The woman shook her head sheepishly and looked up at her, “No I don’t.” 

And that’s when Vivian remembered, Shay was no stranger. She had been there that night because she had always been. How could she have forgotten that kindness? That soft touch accompanied by even softer words. It must have seemed so unimportant then. But now… 

And that’s what made Vivian’s mind up. She had to thank this woman. She owed her at least that.

As Vivian approached the woman leaning against the wall, she saw Shay casually pulled a cigarette from the pack rolled in her shirt sleeve and gingerly set it between her lips with her own half-smoked cigarette, lighting the untouched white film of a Philip Morris. When Viv reached Shay, she was met with an outstretched hand and a freshly lit cigarette resting between two fingers. Viv thanked her for the smoke and took a long, impeding drag.

The day was hot with car engines and tar; frosted pink with pollution and summer sun. Around seven o’clock, the heat was holding on as long as it could before night closed it’s sapphire flue and caused the heat and the crispness to choke upon itself till only a full, chill sky remained. Vivian and Shay hid in the shadow of the playhouse, enjoying a preview of dusk’s coolness. For a while, the two women stood there smoking, not talking, just enjoying the crispness of the moment: the cool cigarettes and long shadows.

About a quarter of the way through her Philip Morris, Vivian spoke.

“You didn’t have to do anything for me. You could have just ignored all of it: the yelling, the crying. You didn’t have to help me.” Vivian swallowed hard, trying to keep the brokenness from showing in her voice, “But… Thank you. Thank you and… I wish I could do something for you. To repay you.”

“I’m not selling. I’m giving.” 

Shay whispered this and the air was warm, even in the shadows. The commotion from the stagehands had quieted considerably. Soft hums of motors drifted to Vivian as she heard cars sputter off down the road, followed by the coughing thunder of the moving van. So that was it, Vivian thought. Lucy Ricardo had officially retired from show business and now carted her belongings off with her. And Vivian winced hearing the van turn the corner. New emptiness, she thought. New spaces cleared of their familiarity. Just like her divorce, just like with Bill… 

It was too much change so she shook her head and tried to fill the emptiness with smoke. In and out, in and out, a grey river that burned slightly, singed you; the slowest and warmest of currents that marinated the heart and soul with slow sorrow. 

Shay dropped her cig, ground it under her heel, and turned to Viv, who knew she must have looked as lost as she felt. Shay was smiling a coy smile, a shining half moon that showed her teeth. It seemed terribly out of place but not unpleasant at all. In fact, Vivian felt herself relax slightly.

“Can I make you dinner? Tomorrow at 7?” 

Viv was surprised by the question.

“No, I…” Vivian took a second with her words, weighed them with a frown, “You don’t have to do that.”

“There are lots of things I don’t have to do.” Shay stepped away from the wall and looked Vivian in the eyes, her hands spread out in front of her in a ‘Life ends pretty damn quickly anyway’ gesture, “But I do them because they’re important to me.”

Shay then took a cigarette paper from her pocket; a pen from behind her ear and scribbled an address down. As Shay pressed the paper into her hand, Vivian felt a heat; a summer night kind of warmth. Viv smiled. But it was a cold smile; a poker face to go along with the feelings she concealed like playing cards against her coat.

“7 o’clock tomorrow… if you want to.”

And Shay left, closing the door to the studio behind her. And Vivian stood on the hot concrete, the buttery reflection of sun and, now that it was becoming dark, streetlights, like a shining Pollock painting on the blacktop, and breathed for a few moments, deep breaths that reminded herself that she was okay.

“Tomorrow at 7.” She whispered, “I’ll be there.”

And she drove her Cadillac back to the house.

 


	4. Billie Holiday: The Catalyst of Honesty

April 7, 1960, Shay Dawson’s flat

Vivian’s hair softly moved against the wind in the pop top Cadillac. She felt like Isadora Duncan; with her sleek body stretched up in the convertible seat as the wind moved her silk scarf. Vivian had put on her Barbara Hulanicki dress; a grey, collared dress with sleeves of burgundy that Vivian saw as elegant yet modest. And, luckily for Vivian, the long sleeves and high neckline could help cover the… remnants of married life. The scars were ugly. Vivian hated that they hadn’t faded when her love for Philip had.

But today was not the day to think of such things. No, today was the day to think of this woman, Shay Dawson. And how to properly repay her.

Vivian had read Shay’s address over and over to make sure she had it right. Shay’s handwriting was a smudged; off-kilter kind of print; like a typewriter whose keys had fallen out of alignment. Viv had traced over the letters in her own writing, trying to decipher it. She had read it over and over…

Apartment B1, North 59th street…

After slipping a piece of paper with her own address and name into her purse, Vivian took the winding; leafy-green drive to the oak colored apartment building on North 59th.

It was an unkind looking building, something that looked like it had been chewed on and spit back up by a hundred storms and quakes. As Vivian parked and stepped out onto the sidewalk, a chorus of alley cats groaned and some empty bottles crashed. The scuff of men’s shoes on the blacktop made Vivian whirl around sharply. A figure walked towards her; smoke following them like a ghost. The light of one cigarette exposed the phantom.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Shay whispered as she flicked the cigarette to the ground.

Shay was in a sleek white button up like cigarette paper; thin and flavorful with the first button undone, showing off her tobacco colored skin. Hooked with two fingers, her grey suit jacket rested on her shoulder.

“I… of course, you invited me, didn't you?” Viv said with an uncomfortable smile.

“I certainly did.”

The walk up the vine-ing staircase to the second floor of the tenement building was hot and awkward. The yellowing paper walls looked like the inside folds of a month old newspaper, faded and outdated. When they reached Shay’s flat and the key was stuck in and the door opened, Vivian’s eyes turned down to the floor. 

“I…”

She couldn’t speak.

The modest, cracked kitchen table was set with two worn china plates and tarnished silver. Two discolored candlesticks sat in the middle of the table with lit candles. And the food, Steak Diane, green salad, and seared potatoes, set on the crowded table with care, could be smelled from behind the door. Vivian felt a hot flush come to her cheeks. She didn’t deserve this…

Shay invited her in, holding the door open. As Vivian leaned in the door, she felt Shay’s hand on her shoulder and her involuntary flinch made Shay draw back.

“I’m sorry,” Vivian whispered.

She was embarrassed. She hadn’t meant to flinch. It was just something that happened sometimes when she was touched. She couldn’t help it. But Shay seemed to understand.

“Don’t be.” she whispered back, “It’s okay.” 

Shay’s half smile was calming and warm. Shay lightly leads Viv in, sensing, as if a phonograph was playing out Vivian’s thoughts word by word, that the meal and candlelight made Vivian uneasy. Vivian shook her head as she was lead inside.

“But I don’t understand,” Vivian whispered.

Shay simply offered Vivian a hand; taking the bottle of wine from her; a bottle of Roma’s 1942 Claret. It was an excellent table wine, a red that Vivian hoped would go well with what Shay had prepared. Shay set it down on the counter; leaned back against the wood of her freshly dusted kitchen counter.

“I just wanted to make dinner for you, you don't need to stay if you don't want to.”

Vivian looked at Shay as she leaned back carelessly against the counter, and for the second time since that terrible night, observed Shay and studied her. The woman looked like any plain Jane, working-class woman. Her hands were dishwater-hard, her skin less than youthfully taut; eyes greying with the cataracts of time and hardships. She wasn’t thin, didn’t have the figure women were forever expected to kill themselves for. The way Vivian would have described her was comfortable; like a baseball glove whose leather had worn down or an upholstered car seat beaten till you felt the springs with every bump. She emanated family heirlooms; the kitchen table you had eaten meals at since you were a child. What she embodied, really, was exotic familiarity; and with it a regale confidence that Vivian was jealous of. Even when off the stage, Vivian felt she was acting when she exuded such confidence. On Shay, the quality was as natural as her coy smile.

Vivian stood still for a moment and appreciated the look of Shay. She hadn’t noticed when they were outside that Shay had tucked a carnation in her lapel. It made Vivian conjure a small smile of her own which she couldn’t help but let Shay see. Suddenly, the evening in its entirety and unknown-ness seemed far less intimidating. Vivian shook her head as her smile widened and whispered shyly, “I want to stay.”

Shay smiled back, “I’m glad. May I take your coat?”

Vivian took it off, handed it to Shay, who hung it on a rack by the door. 

Shay’s apartment was roughly the size of The Ricardo’s; from the TV audience’s view, that is. But even black and white couldn’t have concealed the wear and tear the apartment had undergone through the years. The walls were stained, the lighting yellow and low, the couch an abstract collection of stains and fabric patches. The kitchen was small, with only three cabinets and just enough room for a gas stove and a refrigerator. To the left was a small hallway.

With a stiff awkwardness, Shay pulled out Viv’s chair for her and they sat down to eat. Viv, feeling a little uncomfortable still, opened up the bottle of wine and offered Shay a glass. Viv’s hand with the wine bottle lingered over Shay’s glass. She noticed the way Shay looked at it; weary and desperate. And suddenly Vivian noticed that the woman before her looked much older than she had a few minutes ago. How odd, Vivian thought. Here she was, a successful TV star, but at the moment Shay seemed to be giving a performance of her own.

“No thank you, I’m fine.” And Shay’s crisp grin looked as fake as the waxy grapes on the Roma label.

Vivian set the bottle back down, picked up the cork.

The meal was eaten in silence. Despite her best efforts to eat slowly, casually, Vivian found herself following one bite with another, as if keeping food in her mouth could help her justify avoiding conversation. When both had finished their meal, and the absence of clinking silverware rang through the flat, Shay cleared her throat.

“Would you mind if I put on the radio?” Shay asked.

She motioned over to an old airline radio; it’s dials dead and sleepy. 

Viv smiled as she ran her fingers around the rim of her glass, “Of course not. I love music. Though I’m not much for that Rock and Roll stuff. I stick with the big bands.”

“I’m not crazy about it.” Shay said as she stood to turn on the radio, “It’s too loud for my taste, I guess. My favorite in Ella Fitzgerald; can’t get enough of her. The Ink Spots send me too. And Billie Holiday.”

As Shay plugged in the beautiful little box, static pressed into the tiny room; hissing like beer in a loosely capped bottle. Shay’s hand moved to the now illuminated cat’s eye dial, fidgeting it here and there; catching splices of radio shows and football games between the walls of noise. Then, like the sudden culmination of a rainstorm, the air in the flat changed and became lighter with the sound of a softly played saxophone. The warm voice of a female bar singer poured over the one-room flat, buttery and grey as cigar smoke: 

It cost me a lot  
But there's one thing that I've got  
It's my man, it's my man  
Cold and wet, tired, you bet  
All of this I'll soon forget with my man

The song lightly touched the air around Vivian as it lingered, chord by chord, in the dimly lit flat. 

“Billie Holiday.” Shay whispered in reverence, “This is one of my favorite songs.”

“I sang this while performing for a seedy tabloid show called Cushman’s Revue in Albuquerque.” Vivian whispered, “I hated that show, having to wear barely anything over my skin, thinking always of the dirty men Mama always said were watching me. But this song stuck with me. I think I connected with that song back then, being so close to rock bottom like I was. I had tried to make it in a traveling show. There was no future there and I had to go home and face a town that had believed in me.”

Shay looked at her, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Vivian answered, so venomously she almost spat the words. But Shay didn’t even flinch. Somehow, she understood, and simply nodded her consent. 

The two were quiet again, taking in the melody: 

He's not much for looks  
He's no hero out of books  
But I love him, yes I love him  
Two or three girls has he  
That he likes as well as me  
But I love him  
I don't know why I should  
He isn't true  
He beats me too  
What can I do

Chord by chord, Billie grieved her tragedy in sultry greatness. Her voice bravely lead the band on, pulling the lesser sounds up into her arena. God, she truly was something else, with her voice so painfully lovely and gravely as a riverbed. Something else...

“Would you like to dance?”

Vivian’s finger paused on the rim of her glass, it’s metallic tone going silent. Her eyes drifted, up and up Shay’s cigarette paper shirt with its single button undone. She met

Shay’s eyes above the light of the candle; blushed at the same coy smile Shay had worn yesterday. Shay’s inquisition seemed like it’s own answer to Billie’s hopeless question.

For what could you do when your man beat you other than fain love and dance lightly through the pain? But standing before Vivian wasn't a man, certainly not her man… Her lips turned downward; shame bubbling up through the cracks in her skin. Vivian frowned, looked down into the purple liquid in her glass.

“What do you mean?” she asked in a chill tone that made her shiver when she heard herself.

Shay didn’t respond, at least not how Vivian imagined. 

“I mean, Don’t you want to dance with me?” Shay asked with her curved mouth.

Damn that ridiculous smirk! Vivian thought. But she knew it was with mock disdain that she felt it. Who could hate such a look? So joyous and packed with life.

And she wasn't arrogant like most would be when they had a woman before them they wished to hold in their arms. So boyish it was to cover one’s insecurities with flattery and pretension. Never could Vivian imagine something more off-putting than a man… or a woman for that matter, using smugness to account for a lack of confidence. But Shay, she wasn’t being coy for the sake of masking her insecurities, Vivian could tell. Shay was just too damn insightful. Because yes, Vivian did want to dance with her, now that she was forced to think about it, and Shay could sense that behind the stage curtain of Vivian’s eyes was a learned ability to stifle such desires. And, by playing the foolhardy charmer, Shay was perhaps able to engage such long denied instincts without inciting guilt in Vivian. Perhaps if she could make it appear as if Vivian innocent in this, this unspoken desire to be what could not exist, she could open that little lavender part of Vivian’s heart and make her face its existence. Oh, why couldn't this woman just let Vivian slink back into the dark? Isn't that what she deserved to do after what had happened? But Shay stretched out her hand, her palm open with invitation. Maybe, Vivian wondered,

Maybe…

Maybe Shay was as dangerous as Bill--only in her own ways. Because Shay wasn’t taking advantage of her the way she could have been. Vivian was alone with her, in her apartment, in a part of town she’d never been. But… Vivian’s eyes slipped to the door: the deadbolt was unlocked and the table was a mere six feet from the door, and Vivian was sitting on the end closest to the door with Shay on the opposite. No, Shay wasn’t planning to do anything to her. The stage wasn’t set up properly for another horrid scene like the one with Bill. Perhaps this whole night wasn’t staged at all. Maybe, this was real.

Vivian looked down, considered the hand before her as if it were a viper that could strike at any moment, as her mother’s had. For, when she was young, a palm such as this had only ever reached out in anger, stung her. But a soft gesture such as this felt so… intoxicating. Vivian cursed herself for how she wondered at how different the palms of a woman’s hands must have felt. 

“Last time I danced to this, a man with a patched-up coat called me a flussy.”

“Maybe you should make some new memories. Of this song, I mean. After all, you aren't at rock bottom anymore, are you?” 

Vivian sat there, thinking to herself that it was debatable whether she truly was better now than she had been then. Whoever said time heals all wounds clearly never married of performed in a seedy sideshow. Those things stuck and weighed you down every day; breaking you slowly and softly and tenderly; malice posing as sweet memories.

“Momma never let me dance,” Vivian whispered, trying one last time to stop this, whatever it was, and the way it was making her feel.

Because if anything could sober her it was Momma.

 

“That’s a pity. I’m sure you’re lovely at it.” 

Like a dream, Vivian observed as she cautiously reached out. Something in Vivian told her that to say yes to Shay was a mistake... but to say no would be like shutting the door on love itself. She didn’t understand it; she didn’t care to. 

Vivian lightly took Shay’s hand. It was warm and Vivian habitually let her other hand find it’s way to Shay’s shoulder. Shay pressed her thumb into Vivian’s palm; increasing the warmth and tenderness she was feeling towards this woman.

Shay’s body against hers was firmer than she would have expected; muscled and thick. But even still, she had curves, breasts that gathered together on her front, hips. It was like dancing with a female boxer, and Vivian kept her eyes sharp for a blow. But the way Shay pressed on just the right places with her fingers, held her hand on the appropriate place on Viv’s side, told Vivian that she had done this before, which somehow set Vivian on edge. If there was one thing she hated, it was being in the dark. Why had no one told her it was possible to dance with another woman? Why had her dreams of something like this been made to remain fuzzy from inexperience and naivety? Why, when just one night like tonight would have given her the memory with which to be satisfied and emotionally sedated the rest of her life. All Vivian had needed was one chance to bring to fruition her silly dreams of love with another woman. It didn’t even have to be real love, the two of them just had to play the part believably. 

To the fire in Vivian’s mind, Shay’s touch was like a shower of salt. She couldn't think straight. She couldn't think at all; just continue in circles.

It was chaotic loveliness and Billie Holiday made the fallacy all too believable; all too perfect and impossible to live without.

Oh, my man, I love him so  
He'll never know  
All my life is just despair  
But I don't care  
When he takes me in his arms  
The world is bright, all right

“Vivian, can I ask you something?” Shay whispered, her breath a soft spring wind against her neck.

A shiver ran down Vivian’s back, fear and guilt and excitement. The sensation left her forgetting how to speak and her lips hung open, the moon turning, but it was Shay who whispered, “Why? Why do you still wear your ring?” 

Shay’s voice sounded dusty, pixelized like a bad television, muffled and made distant by Vivian’s denial.

Surely she couldn't be here, letting this woman touch her, hold her. 

Surely this wasn't happening. 

Surely she didn't want this.

And for the first time that night, though she had only had one glass of the wine, Vivian felt sober. She pulled away, looked at the woman she was slow dancing with; then looked to the ring on her left hand; the silver and rose gold bridle used for years to control her every move. And suddenly she wondered why she had never asked herself the same question… Vivian glanced back up at Shay,

“I… I don’t know.” 

Shay smiled warmly. Somehow it seemed out of place, like she was empathetic over something Vivian couldn't identify.

“You do know you aren't married anymore, don't you?”

Vivian felt a twinge of anger at Shay’s poorly delivered line. How could this woman be so protective and caring and suddenly unfeeling and removed? This wasn't some poorly written sitcom they were speaking of; with a bug-eyed housewife and a husband that seemed always uninterested in her egg sized world. This was real; a real marriage where a real housewife had suffered and felt ignored; beaten like the eggs benedict she slaved over and offered up to her husband like a sacrifice to an unforgiving deity. A real housewife that was forced into silvery molds like cake mix, silenced by the heat of her husbands glare; consumed without a second thought. Shaped, remolded with fists, and put away like a clean spoon after dinner. Her life was a sitcom the same way a fatal car crash was entertaining. Where the hell was the punchline? 

But as Vivian looked up to give Shay the dirtiest of looks, she saw the sincerity there. Her eyes were soft and interested, her lips resting from their near-constant smirk. And

Vivian caught herself looking at Shay’s lips for just a second too long. She had never seen them sit on the woman’s face without making an expression. And Vivian realized that

Shay’s lips, even without curving into that devilish smirk that made her eyes shine, were incredibly attractive, so pink and warm against chocolate. But oh how serious it made her face look to have her eyes dulled and her lips tight. Nearly, she looked angered. She clearly wasn't picking fun, Vivian saw that when she looked upon the woman’s knowing face. No... she was breaching a delicate subject in the gentlest of ways. Trying to gently pry open the rusted shut doors of Viv’s heart with a lite hand.

Vivian faltered, stammered, sounded, she was sure, like a complete idiot. And her tongue rolled over the same words like a stuck phonograph. She managed to squeeze out a few things about publicity, the unsavory nature of divorce and the close-minded nature of most people. The principal of it all, whatever that meant. But eventually, Vivian realized that it was all insufficient. And Shay’s eyes, still dull and painfully focused on her, bothered Viv. She would rather see them twinkle, rather see Shay’s mouth pull upward. So Vivian broke down and spoke truthfully:

“When I was younger, I used to always travel with a scrap of paper in my handbag that had my name and address. You see, my doctors say I have what they call a weak mind. Traveling from city to city and sleeping in grundy hotels during my vaudeville days took a big toll on my mind and my health. I lost all my energy and was nauseous with nerves. I thank God those days are over now, but… I still worry. This ring is like that scrap of paper. If I ever go crazy again, at least I’ll know something about who I am.” 

Shay nodded slowly, refusing to look away. She kept her eyes on Vivian, her head tilted towards her. They were closer than Vivian would have wanted but she didn’t ask Shay to let her go. Why? Why am I letting this happen? She had no answer to give herself, at least not the answer her heart was ready to accept. She simply watched as Shay’s brow furrowed.

“But you aren’t a married woman…”

“I still would be if a were stable.”

“Stable?” 

Shay repeated this word back to her with just a hint of soft scorn, as if Vivian had just called herself the queen of England.

“If I were sane,” Vivian whispered with her head tilted downward.

“You find yourself to be insane?”

“Myself and three psychoanalysts,” Vivian answered flatly.

“And what about…” Shay thought about what word was best, “your husband? Do you think he is insane?”

Vivian let out a painful laugh, “He’s too well bred and refined to be insane. He married below himself. He married a weak woman.” 

“What about you is weak?”

“First of all, my mind. Followed by my heart.”

“And that’s why you still wear the ring?”

“Yes.”

Shay shook her head at this, as if trying to understand something that could never be made simple and understandable. All the while their bodies moved without their minds knowing, the song pushing them like a stream. After a very long time, Shay spoke:

“You would return yourself, presuming that what you say comes to true and you can no longer take care of yourself, to someone who treats you like you’re less of a human?

Why not just be insane and happy? Why insane and dehumanized by someone else?” 

“Aren’t all people who go insane dehumanized?” 

“Perhaps by society, hopefully never by their own husband.”

As Shay said this, she could feel Vivian’s body become rigid against hers, as if she was preparing to dash across the room to the door. They danced a few moments in boiling silence.

“All I meant is that no one deserves that.” Shay whispered, “No matter who you are, no one deserves to be an object.”

“Maybe not,” Vivian whispered without looking up.

Shay tenderly pulled her closer, warmed her, “Definitely not.” 

Vivian returned her chin to Shay’s shoulder. They danced the rest of the song in silence.

What's the difference if I say  
I'll go away  
When I know I'll come back on  
My knees some day?  
For whatever my man is  
I am his forever more

Their cheeks; warm and soft, pressed against each other. As Shay’s hand came to Vivian’s waist, she sighed like every pain within herself had suddenly stopped aching. They pulled each other closer; inhaled each other… warm chocolate and clean linens. Hair stood at attention on cold and craving skin. The radio crackled and sparked its’ excitement; it’s dials glowing softly. And the song quieted as if the radio itself did not wish to interrupt...

And against the cold, charming chords of the old song she had known for so long, Vivian felt tears prick her eyes. The water swelled warmly and fell to her cheeks in time with the alto sax that hummed. Vivian told herself that it was just nerves, that her mind was weak like all her doctors had said. Foolish woman, she thought to herself. But Vivian knew… she was feeling loved. And God, how long had it been? Maybe that was the wrong question… Maybe it was the sadder truth that this feeling; this warm well of comfort, was something no other person had cared to offer her. Maybe the right question was this: why had she never felt loved before? Answers tumbled down on Vivian, spoken in her mother’s voice: she was a whore, a sinner, a tart…

And then suddenly it was Phillip’s voice, Phillip’s New Englander accent riffling through the antiquities she possessed; dangling them before her as he whispered: “Never Vivian,

Never will you leave me. Just as you will never be perfect.” And Billie, her song, the soundtrack to the tragedy playing in Vivian’s head, whispered too. Billie’s voice was sad and truthful and tragic. How could Vivian not hear the truth in it? What was the difference if she told Philip she would leave him? Billie sang out the solemn answer to this question; the words sticky in the hot air of the flat; buzzing like flies.

You know you’ll come back.  
You know you’ll come back.

And she was right. Damn, was she right… 

But before Vivian could wipe away the tears that had muddled her features, Shay’s thumb brushed her cheek, carrying away a tear with the motion. Vivian looked up, coldly studying and warmly appreciating Shay at this angle, at this level of closeness. Shay was near to her, warm, and as she leaned in, Vivian didn’t want to pull away.

But she did.

Suddenly the radio cracked and abruptly the voice of an announcer entered the room, “And now, Benny Goodman & his orchestra performing ‘Take Me’”

The two broke the embrace like roots from stem till their feelings, which had been as sure as religious convictions mere moments ago, plummeted into dissent and confusion.

The mood in the flat instantly changed from enchantment to panic, as if the chandelier of a dance hall had suddenly snapped and dropped to the floor, shattering to a million shards of nothingness. The two women looked at each other in the dark; fear like static crackling between them. Silently, they asked themselves the same questions as they stood there, hearts pounding. A man laughed drunkenly out in the hall, a baby cried below them. How had the flat seemed so silent seconds ago? More than once Vivian looked around the small flat, making sure they really were alone; half expecting some sort of audience to be hidden in a back corner snickering and gasping; hooting and jeering. But she saw no one. Only Shay, who stood several feet away, staring at her with anxious, copper eyes.

“I should probably go.” Vivian finally whispered, her eyes on the magic eye of the airline radio.

Shay nodded, buttoned her shirt with shaking fingers, “I understand… And I'm sorry.”

Vivian’s eyes flicked over her, “What for?”

Shay straightened, then shrank again, “I don't know.”

They paused, looking up at each other, the radio’s knobs glowing like cat’s eyes in the dark. 

“I guess…” Shay said, taking care with her words, “I've just never seen a more beautiful human being with such sadness in their eyes.”

Vivian looked at her. And her eyes told Shay that the night had lost its’ enchantment. Like cold, world-weary stars, Viv’s eyes looked back at Shay as if to say ‘I’ve heard that line too often.’ Vivian turned towards the door. 

“Thank you for dinner, it was wonderful.”

And Vivian latched the door and turned down the hall; the warm words of Goodman and his orchestra echoing through the building, melting into the plaster like pastel signatures and watercolor clefs: 

All the love I have to give, I want to give to you,  
And as long as I shall live, I'll only live for you,  
Take me, and never forsake me,  
My darling, please take me and make your own,   
and make me your own… 


	5. The Situation of Sanity

April 8, 1960 - Vivian Vance’s Home

There is an unspoken forgiveness we lend to a frightened child. Why, I do not know. For those who are grown know that it is no service to those small ones to hide what the world truly is, what the world can do. But when closet monsters and under-bed fiends like the fluorescent fish of a deep trench come creeping from all the daytime-forgotten places, we--the old ones, logical and unromantic ones--like robotic saints, bestow words of comfort. We wrap up those small versions of ourselves that we have tried to forget we ever were resembling, and we touch their arms and hold their hands in our larger ones and explain, with the confidence of a Galileo or an Aristotle, the wonders of the universe. And when these explanations, these maps of the stars, are not enough, we lower ourselves, sink into the fog of imagination, and whisper to them. Shhh, we say, You are safe. Nothing and no one can hurt you. 

But, but, the child in the arms of their polymaths doesn’t know that their astronomer mothers and philosopher fathers are still themselves small children. There are monsters under their beds too, new monsters of self-doubt and stringent self-judgment. These things, quiet as dust in the daylight, slip their fingers, slim as wires, into the beds of sleeping couples. For up in locked bedrooms, where couples should have been sweating from passion, these monsters made them instead sweat from anxious waiting for the dawn, when they must again, like a knight, fight off bills with their ballpoint pens and pretend that the world was no more unmanageable than a stubborn grease stain, discoloration on an otherwise perfect, polished, pristine existence. Day by day, the stain remained. Today, it was darker. Tomorrow, larger and consuming more of life.

Today, it was the rain.

Kin to soil, the mind experienced growth during wet weather. Not just of flowers but of poisonous weeds and brambles; long-buried thoughts coming to surface from the softened dirt clinging to it. A waterspout of mental devastation could be birthed by a few drops of water, a lite fog, a hazy air, soft with moisture. To look out a rainy window was to think. To feel a coldness in the air was to question. Like a clock rolling backward, a cloud could stop time. One’s confident physode, like a thick sweater, would be drenched in the unavoidable course that was a thunderstorm. Not one aspect of our bravados can withstand even the lightest of rains. It is nature’s way of softly reminding us that we are much smaller than we think we are. And no matter how straight we stand, no matter how we thrust our chins forward, we are a still just a single bean to be ground, mercilessly, into a steaming cup of coffee.

And it was morning, light with rain. And Vivian with her cup at the kitchen counter, the rain splattering her kitchen windows like a shower of enemy arrows. She shook memories away, the cup with her coffee shaking slightly. Each sip she took had the sour taste of denial. She took three sips, trying to cleanse her mental palate. Didn’t happen.

Wasn’t my fault. Don’t remember. A sputtering of wet echoed throughout the house, a splatter on a canvas, telling Vivian that today she couldn’t escape thinking about it.

Memory and all its inhabitants were uninvited guests on this saturated morning.

And in the foggy softness, the coffee-scent and earth moisture, the memory whose platform this rainy day would become spoke its name: The Albuquerque Little Theater.

The theatre… Oh, that place.

Vivian remembered the crimson carpets, the green-glowing lights of the ticket box and the creaking, hinged oak doors that opened and closed the box office every day at two and every night at eleven. The soft curtain entrance to the modest theater seats, the four, five, six front rows that were every night peppered with aunts and uncles and mothers and brothers. There was a smell of incandescent bulbs and shiny, salted peanuts, their shells strewn like confetti on the floors. She remembered the stage, like a vast desert with the audience oasis just beyond the stage lights and what it felt like to dance till you could barely breathe the humid, dank air and sing till your voice was nothing more than a papery whisper begging that human oasis to breath life back into you with applause. Oh, that magical place, that extraordinary, beautiful, glitteringly endless place. The place where Vivian’s life truly began, the reason her heart began beating: The Theatre.

But Vivian’s most cherished and haunting memory lived behind the curtain, away from applause and after doors were shut. It was a soft, pastel-colored image, a single splice of film that had played over and over in Vivian’s head; a mystery forever unsolved and unconcluded. It was a beginning, a birth, and a death. It was the moment Vivian uncovered something she had never, ever wanted revealed. 

It was the moment she had kissed Florence Merkins. 

Florence… The name always brought to Vivian’s mind the smell of dirt and adventure, the smell of raspberry preserves, sharp, and buttermilk and pink, soft skin. She had been the real-life version of The Shiner by Norman Rockwell; while Vivian was Girl at Mirror, for the difference was that extreme and magnetic. Florence Merkins, with her chestnut eyes that could make you forget that it was impolite to stare, whose skin smelled like buttermilk and whose lips seemed to always have a look of experience. Florence, who kissed girls on the cheek because she volunteered to play the male lead when he missed a rehearsal. Florence who wore pants and didn’t care who stared. Florence who, on a hot New Mexico night, walking home from the theatre with a cigarette between her red lips, had changed the fabric of Vivian’s destiny.

There were stars in the sky that night that sparked like stage lights above, and a soft wind that seemed to narrate the novice scene, whispering “Look! Watch! See what will happen!” The two girls heard the voice in the way the wind blew, the way the air seemed warmer, the way their dresses felt more constricting than usual, hot and confining. And

Vivian looked up to the older girl, the goddess of youthful and danger and risk, engulfed in the light and smoke of a single cigarette on that summer night. 

That night had been just like any other. After six grueling hours of rehearsals for a production that would maybe earn the company enough funds for their next show, Florence and Vivian, their toes wore down from dance and their energy devoured, accompanied each other on their walk home for the evening. Sweat, chill on their bodies from dancing, hung to them, cooled them, and made the evening air crisp against their skin. The two girls watched the landmarks of their nightly journey pass: the soft glow of the delicatessen’s sign: Best Sandwiches In Town!, the dessert case still spinning slow and delicious inside, the hum of a sleeping jukebox at the soda shop. Come back tomorrow! the sign on the door read. For Vivian and Florence, there was no going back after tonight. 

Against Florence’s bright red lips was a cigarette, a cigarette that she and Viv shared every night. A drag for Flo, then a drag for Viv. Back and forth the cigarette went till they reached home. Four months had they done this, pressing the cotton end to one pair of lips, then, with lipstick fresh on the white film, passing it to another mouth to inhale.

And somewhere, crisscrossed between the drags that came and went, came and went, the realization dawned on both girls that their lips, in a manner of speaking, had touched, ten, twenty, a hundred times over the course of those four months, the cigarette they shared like a bridge to some place they didn’t know existed but one night, they realized they wanted to visit.

“Have you ever… kissed a boy?” Vivian asked sheepishly on that walk home.

“I’ve kissed people,” Florence spoke through a hazy exhale of cigarette smoke. She offered Vivian a drag, which she took, thinking again of the lingering breath that hung on the paper.

“I don’t mean your family.” Vivian whispered through an exhale of smoke, “I mean a sweetheart, a boyfriend.”

“Sure, lots of times.”

“Then can you tell me how to, um, you know, do it. Maybe… give me advice?” 

Vivian thought it was an innocent question. She had told Florence that she had never kissed anyone and that Roddy Mayfield, a boy from her neighborhood, had asked her out. Known for his habit of taking girls to secluded parks with a pack of near-beer and a disarming smile, Vivian knew Roddy would be expecting her to play along with his playful touches and soft suggestions. She knew where the evening would undoubtedly lead and she needed help with the mechanics of the whole ‘necking’ thing. Maybe Florence, in her infinite wisdom of nineteen, could give her some instruction. Florence flicked a few ashes into the wind and met Vivian’s nervous eyes with her own unwavering ones,

“Maybe one thing.” 

And she stopped walking. Vivian did too, trying to follow everything the girl said, did. A soft line crinkled in Florence's forehead, a frown. She looked at Viv and her lips split open, perhaps to speak, but no words came out. A completely different girl stood before Viv for all of three seconds: a girl unsure of herself, a girl somehow a few inches shorter, a girl not unlike herself.

The two stood still against the darkness. It was now cold, their bodies shivering. They stood still on the street outside a dress shop, two plastic ladies, both impeccably dressed, watching silently the two girls behind the glass. The unmoving eyes saw as Florence leaned in close, looked Viv square in the eyes, and whispered excitedly, “Have you heard that phrase… the one that goes: ‘experience is the best teacher’?”

Vivian looked into Florence’s eyes and slowly nodded. Her body was a rigid board, her breath quickening but her body slow to react as Florence’s lips came like a soft breeze against her own. Vivian’s heart jumped: her chest like a tiny electric light about to pop. Florence’s hands were on her hips before she knew it, each finger pressing a soft mark into her skin. And soon Viv’s arms were around the waist of a woman who would live forever in the silent chasm of her mind that echoed always with the sound of ‘what if?’ And

Vivian was so overcome with nothing and everything, so terrified that this was happening and may never happen again that she held onto Florence, and in all her confusion and stubborn curiosity, clung to her till every wish, hope, and heartthrob had been satisfied.  
When their breath returned they let go of each other. Slowly at first, then with a quick withdrawal of their limbs as if they had been burned. They started walking home again, neither speaking. Like a white moth, dying, the shared cigarette lay forgotten on the concrete behind them, burning still till the wind made it smoke and shrivel… 

That summer, Florence hitched a ride to New York and picked up a job singing for a band at a speakeasy. Vivian married and left with her musician husband to tour in Vaudeville shows. Vivian never saw Florence again.

From that day forward, there was an indentation in Vivian’s heart that had never been there before, an empty space the shape of a woman’s voice, a woman’s kiss. Of course, Vivian reminded herself, there had been boys too. But her memories of them were lax. She knew she had danced with them, kissed them, gone steady with too many of them to count. The fast-traveling gossip of her hometown had pegged her “boy crazy.” And Vivian couldn’t argue with that. She was crazy; crazy in the same way addicts were crazy.

Intimacy with a boy never seemed to bring about that sensation that the other girls squealed about for weeks to come. They seemed cheap imitations of what she really wanted, faded postcards from paradises once visited. Vivian tried to forget Florence, her touch. She followed one hollow boy-crazed high after another; stacking kiss upon kiss in order to ensure that she never had the time to fall back to earth and face the gritty, scandalous truth. But nothing could strip Florence’s fingerprints from the skin of her hips.

Vivian had necked with boys in their station wagon back seats, near beer on her lips and fingers strategically crawling and clawing up her skirts. And Vivian had never said no; not once. But every night that this happened hung about Vivian without conclusion, her pillow tear-stained and cold. Vivian didn’t understand any of this then, but she knew that a boy’s kiss was not what she needed to be satisfied. Nor was the pleasure they spoke of in husky whispers upon conclusion something she reciprocated. All it was was a dull, guttural roll through a sensation of scents and wetness and a slight amount of pain. But never pleasure. Never any pleasure… It was only to feel real and loved that she did it, not any dirty reasons as most people would assume. She did it because kissing boys, going steady with them, raising her skirts when she knew they were watching, was just enough to keep the local bible-thumping bloodhounds away from the truth. Because no one ever seemed to care that her more intimate and caring relationships were with the other local girls. If she had laid with one of the others girls underneath a tree in plain view; the obvious scandal of this would have been overshadowed by the rumors that she had had beaus in nearly every surrounding county. If the world was a stage, then her adolescent years were most certainly romantic tragedies; played upon a stage where the incandescent light seemed to focus on all the wrong characters at the wrong time. While the rumors of Independence shinned its accusing light on Vivian and the boys she’d been with, her passion for chorus girls and leading ladies was forever aching and pulsing like electricity from backstage.

But oh how fruitful playing the blonde floozy had been. Using those curves, those breasts that developed as she grew older, her coy and maddening eyes, she had found ‘friends’ that had helped secure places for her in chorus lines, small speaking roles. From the back seats of station wagons to the stages of Vaudeville, men had been Viv’s ticket out of Independence, Kansas. The men Viv took up with saw her talent. They knew she had what it took to succeed. Producers and leading men, freshly reminded of her talents, of which she had many, were going to help her get what she wanted: a Vaudeville career. And Vivian merely needed to keep herself fresh on their minds till a part for her in their productions opened up. With men, what other way to do this than with sex? This was the other lesson Florence Merkins had taught Vivian: that men just wanted to use you, and you had to be smart enough to get what you needed out of them. 

But un the end, Vivian’s talent propelled her into a successful Broadway career, a career that could stand on its own without the help of the men she had once kept company with. And when success came, men and making love to them left Vivian’s life. And she was content to live without, content to grow old with nothing more than a successful career. But then came Philip Ober and with him the chance to take her career to a new, exciting horizon. Vivian’s hunger for the stage, her curiosity with turning life’s corners, led to a marriage that turned her black and blue and cynical of any play whose theme focused on true love. Her own life, a play of its own kind, felt like a horrible tragedy that lead to the worst conclusion you could draw about a life: that it had been wasted. 

But was that where the curtains closed? Vivian wondered, or had the great playwright, dissatisfied with the tragedy Vivian’s life had become and hearing her hunger for a new fate, added a new character to this tale? Was there a knight in shining armor gliding in at the darkest hour?

But that was far too romantic, Vivian told herself. This wasn’t teenage love anymore. And love, like lightning, never struck the same place twice. Some new territory inside Vivian was shifting towards consciousness. There was something astonishingly refreshing about Shay; so crystal clear, transparent, and yet unknowable. Vivian couldn’t even recall the last time she had been touched so gently, carefully. And Vivian could have read every thought in Shay’s head by the way she had held her.   
It was something so good and sweet being held by Shay that the other facet, the feeling of lust, seemed impossible to reconcile. But how could Vivan not address the physical wonders of this echoed body? There was familiarity in the woman’s curves, safety in exploring the known and yet exotic landscape of another female. But this was too wrong, Vivian thought. Because this new territory was, in part, gluttony; full of a titillation so verily passionate and carnal that cannibals themselves would have blushed with embarrassment. Eating a woman was wrong; swallowing them whole and becoming them was psychoneurotic. But that was what Vivian wanted: to consume everything about

Shay Dawson and, like a seed pod, keep her both captive and safe. She wanted to kill every feeling she had for this woman and bring them to fruition all in the same speck of evening. What was she thinking? What the hell was she thinking? And last night? Last night was a mistake. Vivian had no doubt and every doubt about it as she drove home that evening. 

Oh yes. She knew, from the moment she began to descend the stairs of that decrepit tenement building, that liquor would be necessary and conducive to sleep that evening.

Hot water would be needed for the muscles that had strained to keep her from mistakes of genuineness; wool comforters and a bed of coals in a furnace like a salve on the sores that had, whether the stubborn woman would admit it, been reopened and reinfected with the virus of honesty. 

The sky had turned a deep orange as she pushed through the grubby glass doors of North 59th Street. She clicked up the grey concrete with its characteristic cracks and discarded cigarette butts. She passed an overflowing trash can; rusted to the spot, and a city grate steaming like fresh cake from the oven. A cat yowled down one of the allies.

It came running down the street a few feet away and nearly ran right into her before screeching and turning down another alley. The cat was black. It didn't have a collar and with thin as the lead of a pencil. Vivian wanted to run after it; take it in and nurse it, spoon feed it kindness till all the meanness was gone. But she knew… it wasn't in the cat’s nature to be loved and cared for. Vivian had often wondered about that in herself too… 

The night was like the skin of a nectarine: smooth, orange here and softly flushed pink and buttery, ripe with the nectars of coldness and damp expectancy. The clouds above were pregnant, cottony beasts that grumbled with the need to release from their hollow a burst of pewter crystals. The air bit into her skin, sharp nips that let in the chill of evening. Her face burned with the temperature, the pink sky mirrored by her warm cheeks. She smelled summer from a distance. She waited. Something had to happen. The clouds rolled further; Grey monsters, roaring……… she stood on the sidewalk and watched………… 

But when the rain came, it was only a lit, alice blue speckling. A friendly caress from the cold and careful fingers of mother nature. This disappointed Vivian. The crescendo was absent and needed. She entered the Cadillac and bitterly turned the key. 

For nature had failed to dramatize properly the atmosphere of her soul. 

* * *

So it was a slightly stronger spattering of rain that came down as the Cadillac kicked up mud and stones like black, sour pomes on a back road on the way to Culver City. The sun had since fallen behind the horizon and the grey clouds were soon joined by twilight. The world through the windows soon became coarse, like black sand on a beach abused by the tide. Soon the rain beat at the car and mocked the radio’s attempts to drown its howl (some talk radio nonsense about an astronomer in Green Bank, West Virginia who had picked up signs of intelligent life.) It would not be silenced. Nor, it seemed, would Vivian’s guilt be put to the muzzle. The body of the car ricketed back and forth on a labyrinth of gravel and wet brush. And Vivian leaned forward, angry, against the wheel. The wind stripped green life from the trees and glued them, grey and black, to the windshield where they were violently walloped by the whippers. The headlights burned white holes into the hollow as the car pitched its way into the intense blackness and white light of storm and conflict. 

Foolish, Vivian thought. She had been foolish. Why had she thought it would be safe to go to Shays’? Why had she assumed that her thoughts would remain innocent? Florence Merkins was evidence that it could never be safe; a relationship with another woman. Always would it be shadowed by her own sin.

It all would have been easier, Vivian reflected, had she taken life’s main roads, the ones everyone took because they didn’t know any others existed or because they were too afraid to trust the condition, the razor-thin margins that were characteristic of these underused paths. Why hadn’t she taken the main roads? She had been like a mad woman behind the wheel, pushing the at a jolting speed down the wet gravel. Roads like that, the ones that no one else dared to explore, weren’t designed to be traveled at such a dizzying speed. You needed to be patient, cautious. You needed to expect the bumps and the sharp turns and the rundown nature of the path because no one went this way.

And if someone happened to make a wrong turn and stumble upon this direction, they would frantically turn around and speed off toward the main road. Where it was easy, smooth, and controllable. But she was too far down this path now, and kept thinking, knowing, it was too late to turn around. So she had pushed forward at breakneck speed, hopelessly attempting to put adequate distance between herself and what she saw looming in the rear-view mirror… 

After forty-five minutes, and like a jarring strike to the temples, the Cadillac lurched heavily into the drive at 9:37 as it read on the car’s chrome dashboard. Vivian’s hand shakily put the car in park, turned the golden lights from high beams to low beams, and from low beams to off. Still certain of that pursuer in the rearview mirror, she adjusted the glass so it faced the passenger side and stepped out onto the wet concrete of the driveway. 

As almost always, the lights in the two-story brown brick house were dead, shut like eyes to the dark. The second story window at the far right, the master bedroom, was dark as well. The mailbox was stuffed with letters received, the paper damp and withered on the step. It was obvious. Philip wasn’t home. 

As Vivian fished her keys from her purse, rooting around the scrap of paper and pill bottles, she felt a sigh of relief, one she hadn’t meant to release, escape her. She needed to be alone tonight, she thought. She needed to desaturate from the soggy sentences, the heavy events that had occurred. She needed to feel lit, airy. She needed to be able to loosen her mouth so she smiled more freely. She needed liqueur. God… Viv thought as she pushed inside the house and threw off her coat, could anything be truer?

Rather than drink the entire bottle exceedingly cheap wine that she had brought with her from Shay’s, the red Roma that could be run through a car more efficiently than a human stomach, Vivian made up her mind on something that could warm her: a hot tottie. As she took a teacup and a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet, she remembered that hot totties were how her mother had always taken her liquor (It seemed that if you took your spirits with a cup of tea it wasn’t sinful in the eyes of God,) and a pang so sharp it nearly dug tears from Vivian’s eyes had throbbed in her. Suddenly, Vivian’s mind had echoed with the voice of her mother: “What did I ever do to deserve a child like you, Vivian?” the voice screeched, “So bullheaded, so stubborn, so unrepenting! Haven’t you any decency? How dare you wear a dress that shows your ankles! You’ll be nothing but a whore one day if you dress like that! Oh, what am I to do with you?”

“No.” Vivian had whispered into the dark air of night, “I’m not a bad girl. I'm not a whore.”

But her words felt hollow to her ears. She didn’t believe them… 

And so the ghost of Vivian’s mother, the phantom that had visited so many times, slunk through the house, infecting Vivian with doubt and self-hatred. And in the morning, torn at by the brambles of daylight and the smells of black coffee and hot cereal, deserted.

The next morning, Vivian nearly tripped over her own feet as she shot up and ran to the phone, her fingers moving from sheer habit as they picked out her psychoanalyst’s number on the dial. As she dialed, she knew what Dr. Steele would tell her. She knew he would reassure her kindly; remind her sanity that it shouldn’t wander as it always seemed to. But Vivian knew that the situation was worsening, the situation of sanity, and she felt like running up the stairs of her mind with ropes in hand; tying everything important to her to the walls of her brain while the winds of insanity continued shaking her wits and knocking the bricks of her sanity from its’ mortar. What was she to do? Oh, what was she to do?

“Doctor Steele’s office, Can I help you?"

“Help... I need help.”

The line was silent for a few moments. Vivian began to cry.

“Can I ask who's calling?”

“Vivian… Vivian Ober.”

“Of course, Ms. Ober. How are you?”

“I need to see Doctor Steele.”

Papers rustled in the background. Vivian could practically smell the woman’s perfume; her sighs; her inability to understand.

“I’m sorry, he isn’t in today. I could put you down for sometime next week. Does 3 o'clock next Friday work with your schedule?”

Vivian squeezed her eyes shut tight.

“I need him, please. I need to talk to him now.”

“Ma’am, are you alright? Do you need me to call someone for you?”

“I just need to see Doctor Steele. Please, I just need to see him.”

“Ms. Ober, he isn’t in the off-”

“Today! Now! What don't you understand about that?”

The woman on the other end was silent for a few moments. Vivian felt the tears paint their way down her neck, softly staining her.

“Ms. Ober, are you sure you don’t want me to call someone for you?"

Vivian held the phone in a death grip, her knuckles white; slick. She sunk to the floor, the walls continuing their descent onto her as the woman in the phone looped like a record.

Ms. Ober?  
Ms. Ober?

She let the phone slide from her hands as she cupped her face, creating a veil with which to block out the parts of the world she couldn’t bare to see.   
She was on the verge of remembering. And she pushed back with everything she could. She didn’t want to remember her mother. It felt far more comfortable to orphan herself than to accept the alternative. Her mother was much better to her in her imagination. Let her stay there, Vivian thought, with Casper the friendly ghost and Peter Rabbit; friendly figments that didn’t exist in the real world.

“Not bad. Not a whore. Not a bad girl.”

But her words still felt hollow and she was powerless to believe them.

She never could…


	6. A Fear of Deviance

April 9, 1960 - Dr. Steele’s Office

Vivian had made over a hundred visits to Dr. Steele’s second story office in downtown Culver City. And she had spent hours sitting in the freshly licealled and dusted waiting room with its argil love seats, the month-old copies of Lady’s Circle and Movie Mirror and a few other gossip-filled rag sheets lying one on top of the other at perfect angles Vivian had come to a final conclusion: No one in a waiting room is ever just waiting. Their nerves, their sickness, was betrayed by the restless jiggle of a foot, a shakily struck match; an unbuttoning of coats that immediately came back on, the shrapnel of glances that were thrown, sinking into the other people in the waiting room. The women who were being abused at home kept their coats on, the ones who had fainting spells gripped the armrests of their chairs with white knuckles, the ones who never ate sat rigid as prisoners of war waiting for their rations. They were motionlessly moving closer to the head doctor with his syringe of mystical modern contentment. They were bringing the miscarriages of their minds to be mourned and buried, soon forgotten and glossed over by smiles and brightly colored pills. They were part of a mental death march.

Or maybe, Vivian thought to herself, it was just her.

“Ms. Ober?”

The stick-ish blonde craned her neck out to a severe angle and scanned the argil couches.

“Ms. Ober, to see Dr. Steele?”

Vivian walked up to the cedar desk. She eyed the secretary and determined that she was the same woman from the phone call yesterday. The shrill voice was one that could be remembered easily. As Vivian watched the woman at the desk, she noticed the other tells of her personality: the fiddled of manicured nails with imitation pearls, the twirl of her fingers between her synthetic, blonde curls; the severe nostrils, hooked upward in a constant disapproving flare. The black Persian eye makeup. A wax version of the woman would have looked less synthetic. The grotesque smudges of rouge and eyeliner were befitting a working woman, not a psychoanalysts secretary and Dr. Steele had probably already diagnosed her with some histrionic ailment. For she was fake; a jukebox that plays popular music and even when turned off, was a gaudy, ugly thing to look at. As Vivian reached the desk, the counterfeit Cleopatra buzzed Dr. Steele on the intercom system. A crisp, sterile voice answered her.

“Your 3 o’clock is here, Dr. Steele.”

There was a sound of papers shifting and desk drawers sliding shut.

“Send her back.”

The blonde’s finger lifted from the intercom.

“You can go back now.” the woman said, her voice hitting a truly impressive note and encased in a slight southern twang.

Vivian walked through a short hallway of doors with stenciled, frosted windows displaying the names and titles of several prominent psychoanalysts. The second to last door on the right read Dr. George H. Steele, Ph.D. Vivian knocked and was met with a grunt that only slightly resembled an invitation to enter. She took a seat and was only met with an acknowledging glance after she had watched Dr. Steele organize his desk reposition himself in the leather armchair he always sat in, his throne to the kingdom of remedies, revelations, and Ritalin. He lit his cigarette and picked up his fountain pen.

“Ms. Ober.” Steele read her name from the top of a page in his leather-bound journal, “Nice to see you.”

Nice would never have been the word Vivian would use. Terrifying, unnerving, intense… not nice.

“Hello, Doctor,” she whispered, her voice already shaking.

Always, a dam was breached in Vivian during these sessions, her thoughts moving smoothly to consciousness like the methodical legs of a great centipede.

“Let’s continue our thoughts from the previous session, Ms. Ober, let’s discuss your mother.”

“What about her?”

“Let’s talk about what you told me last time, about the black eye.”

“In one of the productions at the Little Theatre, I had a black eye, a real one. I told my director and friend, Kathryn O’Conner, that I had fallen off a horse. Really, Mama had, after one too many whippings, broken her willow switch. That horrid thing had been like a third arm to her for many years. When it broke after the last whipping, she hauled off and hit me, all the while crying that she didn’t want to, if only I wasn’t so hellish and in need of punishment. To Mama, everything I did was deserving of the fires of hell… Momma always said I was a whore. She said if I wore my skirts too high or wore makeup that I was worthless and only undesirable men would want me… Maybe I’m still trying to convince myself I’m not those things.”

“And how are you trying to convince yourself that your mother was wrong?”

“Maybe I’m trying to avoid men… If I avoid them, they can’t hurt me and there can’t be any reason for me to feel that I’m the things my mother said… I just don’t want to feel like a whore…”

“Ms. Ober, It is no secret that your mother was not well.”

“It’s no secret that I’m unwell.”

“Because she made you this way.”

“Yes… She made me this way…”

Vivian coughed the words up, like a mucus, like it was the source of the problem. Like Dr. Steele, with his mental tongue depressor, had looked in and said, ‘Ah! Here is the problem! Here is all the gunk and the green, messy liquid. It must be your throat that is the root of the illness!’ And there you sat, with a fever of one hundred five, shivering and weak and completely unconvinced.

But today, with a copy of an article that had come out about her and Lucille Ball, Vivian knew that Momma was a small fraction of her ills.

“You’ve seen the articles,” Vivian said shakily.

“Yes, and we’ve gone over them.” Dr. Steele said tiredly.

“Do you think…? Am I…?”

She paused, unable to speak the word. Instead, she pressed another question out of her lungs, “Have you found something out about me, about anything that could be wrong inside me, that you won’t tell me?”

The doctor just looked at her stoically.

“You know what I’m asking you, don’t you?” She whispered, her eyes on the single cigar burn in the Auburn carpet.

“Yes. You want to know whether I’ve diagnosed you according to the DSM-2. You want to know what illness fits you.”

“You just say I’m nervous. You don’t tell me what you really think about me.”

“Is it a doctor’s job to mold their opinions of their patients into some personal diagnosis? Or is it to listen and let the patient tell them the name of their ills. What am I supposed to tell you, Ms. Ober? That I have some briefcase under my desk with the name of what ails you painted on it and an arsenal of pills and potions to turn you back into what you were before all this? No, Ms. Ober. I am no wizard. And I do not diagnose on a whim. Yet you seem to believe that there is some kind of diagnosis I am refusing to disclose to you. Believing I am misleading you, and refusing to believe me when I say I am not, would you not call that nerves and paranoia, Ms. Ober?”

“I just need to know I’m not… sick sexually.”

“Ms. Ober, I don’t believe you’re a homosexual because I don’t believe anyone is. Homosexuality is a learned disease, something an individual comes into contact with because others around them have participated or thought on sodomy.”

The doctor repositioned himself, switching knees and placing his notes back in his lap. He took his time as he lit a cigarette,

“I do, however, believe you to be a phenomenal actress; an actress that can so completely become what is expected that it is hard for you to return to who you are. These rumors and articles suggesting that the nature of your relationship with Ms. Ball is a sexual one makes you feel that this is who you must be, a homosexual, either by nature or action. What you are experiencing is no different than reading a script and becoming a character. TV actress Vivian Vance becomes Ethel Mertz by way of a script and an expectation. You believe yourself to be homosexual for these very same reasons: a script of articles and rumors and society’s expectation that what they say about you must be true.”

But, Vivian thought but dare not speak, she had always played the ‘other woman’ in the theater. If an eccentric, sexual, man-controlling woman was what she had had to become… What had she been before that? What organic desires did she, Vivian Vance, experience? Florence Merkins and her Norman Rockwell charm flashed in Vivian’s head.

She shook her away from her, like an annoying little beetle; an Egyptian, golden beetle that was godlike and forbidden.

“But can rumors and articles make me feel.... different inside? Towards women?”

The question was like laying down a weak hand at a poker table and praying no one laid down a flush. In her mind’s eye, Vivian knew that everything she had was hanging by a thumbnail, his response. Love, in the form of checked poker chips, were the bet she made and, perhaps for the better, was about to lose. The doctor looked at her coldly, took a drag. He did not notice the way Vivian’s hands came up to her breast’s in two loose fists, as if she were shielding dog-eared playing cards.

“Tell me, Ms. Ober,” he said as he tapped ashes into a silver tray, “do you feel things differently as Ethel Mertz than you do as yourself?”

“Ethel Mertz isn't real.”

“And neither is this homosexual version of yourself.”

Ethel Mertz… Would that phantom ever stop coloring people’s perceptions of her? No. When she died, there would be people who sent flowers to Ethel Mertz.

“I can't stand it sometimes…” Vivian whispered angrily.

“You can't stand what, Ms. Ober?”

“The whole world, or at least anyone who knows me, expecting me to be like her. To be happy.”

The doctor softened.

“With as challenging a life as you've had, it makes sense that happiness is the mask you've most ready wore. Vivian, you haven't given the world anything else to go by. Of the two masks of entertainment, you've never shed comedy, not even once. You are one of the Thalia's of this decade; a goddess of comedy and muse and laughter. But it's only because there is a Melpomene hiding within; a nonfictional tragedy that drowns like Ophelia inside your mind.”

“It isn't that I'm never happy.” Vivian stammered, “Its that I'm not allowed to be anything else.”

“Anything can be a prison if we are forced to remain there. Even a state of mind can feel like a state prison if the rules surrounding it are strict enough.”

“But I'm still afraid, Doctor.”

With an unamused sigh and mechanical twist of his wrist, Dr. Steele checked his watch, scribbled down a last note, and stood to conclude their time together. It was a sequence of actions as unchanging as Vivian’s need for these sessions.

“A fear of deviance is not unhealthy, Ms. Ober.” Dr. Steele stated as he motioned towards the door, “It keeps us on a straight path.”

Vivian stood, walked to the door, and as she turned to leave, said, “But what if my feelings don’t change, doctor?”

“Ms. Ober,” he was being straightforward, quick. He looked at her with serious blue eyes behind lenses, “If you knew you had a contagious disease, would you quarantine yourself?”

“Of course.”

The doctor nodded and closed the door to his office.

* * *

An hour after the session, Lucille and Viv met at the Culver Museum of Art.

Filming with Lucy and being her friend had been two very different things, Vivian noted as she walked through a museum with her co-star. Viv had often wondered whether their competitive natures prevented their friendship from flourishing while the show had been running. Now that the race was over and 1st and 2nd prize had been awarded respectively, they could be as all good girlfriends should: loyal, loving, and there in the thick of it for each other. That was what today was: a way to support each other by being near each other. 

“What’s wrong?” Lucille asked as they walked the museum, her eyes remaining on the French impression painting in front of her.

“It’s just… Don’t you worry sometimes? About the rumors?” Vivian asked.

Lucille gazed up, her eyes switching to a Pollok, a mess of reds and blues and blacks that looked far too familiar to both women. Her brow furrowed; like she was angry, fuming, actually, but her voice was soft.

“Why should I? I know they aren’t true. And if what people were saying really could ruin our careers, we would be out of work by now. If all that communism nonsense taught me anything, it’s that scared people will try to make you into a villain for no other reason other than that they need someone to hate. But if you give them the truth, the honest truth, they come around. It’s all about having faith that people are better at heart than how they act.”

Vivian recalled reading an article about Lucy’s short-lived association with the communist party. Articles had used her red hair as a clever euphemism for her connection with communism; claiming she sported the party’s color out of solidarity. And though it was true that Lucy had registered as a communist in 36, she had confidently proclaimed that she had no intention of letting any of that ruin her career. She was honest; something Vivian admired her for endlessly. You know I love him, don’t you?” Lucille whispered.

Him. Desi. Vivian knew what Lucille meant. After all, veiling her feelings with general statements was a habit of Lucy’s.

Vivian nodded, her eyes remaining on the Pollok, “The same way I loved Philip.”

Lucille nodded, turned to face Vivian, “If this woman loves you… God, please don’t keep choosing people like him, Viv. If you need a woman in order to be loved as you should, why should I or anyone else care?”

Vivian went white.

“How did you…”

“I’m not blind, Viv. But neither is the rest of the world. Be careful. Nothing’s wrong with what you’re doing but not everyone sees it that way.”

“They say it’s a disease,” Vivian said flatly.

“They said the same thing about communism, and I turned out alright, didn’t I?”

Viv nodded, tried to smile.

“Besides, you better pull yourself together. After all, I’m going to need someone to comfort me soon.”

Vivian took Lucille’s hand, squeezed it tight. They spent the rest of the evening in the museum; their childish giggles and desperate embraces echoing in all the rooms that it shouldn’t. And when they reached Zedekiah Belknap’s ‘Two Children with a Basket of Fruit,’ Lucille started crying.


	7. Static and Smoke

May 27, 1960 - The Lucy-Desi Playhouse

It took a few days for the full I Love Lucy set to be struck down. The set was heavy in a way that no one there could fully understand. The weightiness was not just physical. It was emotional, spiritual in a way. Each prop was more than paste and plywood. It carried five years of dust, gossip, and laughter along with it; five years of American memories.

Like a skeleton, the pieces began to gather and lay disjointed and boney against the floor of the old warehouse. It was like a grave, lost and forgotten. 

After the last of the set was struck, Shay stepped out for a smoke. Though many of the stagehands had chosen to remain in the building, it felt too sacred a place to Shay. She didn’t like the idea of filling a space already so full with something else; something less important. 

As Shay stepped outside, she noticed Ms. Ball leaning against the wall, her red hair pulled back and just a bit disheveled. She wore an oversized, white blouse tucked into her black slacks, an old pair of shoes that Shay recognized as Lucy Ricardo’s “stay at home” flats. In this state, she looked nothing like the co-owner of a production company. Nor did she look like the Bengal tiger of industry that had pushed herself up from a Goldwyn chorus girl to buying out the film company that had once hired her on, Radio-Keith-Orpheum, more commonly known as RKO Pictures, and turning it into the TV pinnacle of Desilu Studios. At that moment, she simply looked like a tired housewife, an average woman with a less than newsworthy life and a husband that drove her to chain smoking in the bathroom each evening. Average, tired, small. Three things Lucille Ball would never admit to being. Three things that connected women these days with each other, a common ground. But Ms. Ball seemed to levitate above commonality. It was why today was the only time Shay felt comfortable standing within such close proximity to her: she seemed to at last being standing on solid and indisputably normal ground.

Shay took a spot on the opposite side of the wall, thumping her cigarettes against her palm. It wasn’t till after she had lit her cigarette that she noticed Lucille walking towards her. She moved gracefully, commandingly, and leaned easily against the bricks a mere foot from Shay. For a few moments, they just stood there smoking. Then Lucille let out a drag and paused, looking over at Shay.

“Viv mentioned you.”

Shay held her cigarette still between her fingers, glancing forward and trying to avoid whatever this conversation was about to turn into to. 

“She doesn’t know me,” Shay said flatly and sucked in more smoke.

Lucille let out another drag slowly, “She does more than just know you, Ms. Dawson.”

Shay looked over at this. It was clear that Lucille knew about her and Viv. And if she was like so many others that Shay had known before, her knowing about Shay and Vivian couldn’t be good. Shay straightened.

“After today, I don’t work for Desilu. If you’re firing me, save it.”

Lucille was quiet for a few moments, shaking her head. Shay saw a tiny smirk on her lips, an element of emoting that a TV audience never got to see. This was the real Lucille Ball.

“What the hell makes you think I care what you do with your time or your libido? You take women to bed? That’s no concern of mine. So hear this, because I’m not firing you. I’m thanking you.”

Shay furrowed her brow, dropped her half-smoked cigarette to the ground, cursed.

“For protecting her?”

“In more ways than one, Ms. Dawson.” 

Lucille pulled another cigarette from the pack she had rolled in her shirt sleeve, handed it to Shay.

“I’m aware of what happened that night. You can’t film the most popular TV series to date and neglect to have eyes on the cast. I just would never have thought… Well, I just blame myself, I guess. We all knew Bill was a drunk bastard, but no one knew until now that he was an attempted rapist.”

“Where is Bill now?”

“Living with his sister is what I heard. Spends his days drinking E & B by the pack and watching baseball on an old tube TV.” 

“Not much of a life but at least he’s not hurting anyone.” 

“No one other than himself, Ms. Dawson, and that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

Lucille’s voice was as cool as the Philip Morris against her lips. If she had been distraught over what had happened here just a few weeks ago, she didn’t show it. Shay lit her cig with shaking fingers, tried to steady her hands by pressing them against the wall. 

“What is this?” Shay asked between drags, looking at the exhalation of smoke as if the answer to this question was no more than a wisp of vapor.

Lucille laughed.

“You ask what this is, Ms. Dawson.” And she leaned close, “This is an audition.”

Shay didn’t look at her. Lucille continued, 

“You know her ex-husband?”

“The movie actor?”

“The bastard. But yes, he does act.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters, Ms. Dawson. It matters because Viv’s a dear friend, a dear, dear friend. And I put up with watching Philip beat her and abuse her for too long to let anyone who might do that to her again step into her life. That man beat the ever-loving shit out of Vivian. Everyone knew he never let up on her. If she didn’t have bruises from being beaten, she had bruises from knocking her own head against the wall. Damn, he made her crazy, so crazy she couldn’t bear to even hear that word. Once, the word ‘crazy’ had been used in the script and Viv nearly screamed at Jess during a rehearsal for it. God, how she hated that word! After Jess had heard her out and she had calmed down, she said, I’ll never forget it: ‘Get rid of the word ‘crazy,’ Jess. A word like that could undo a year’s worth of therapy for those who are institutionalized’.” 

Lucille took another drag, shook her head to scare off the memory, or perhaps, more accurately, the guilt associated with it,

“I should never have told Jess to put the word back in, but I did. Back then, it was all about success for me. And if Viv’s mental health threatened the show, by God, I was going to get her to crack as soon as I could so we could move on without her, cut her clean out of the show before the audience developed an attachment to her character. But Viv’s tougher than she gives herself credit for… That’s why she stuck with the fuckin’ wife beater like a sheep to the slaughter. There are too many Philip Obers in this world and too many Vivians that will keep putting up with them till it’s too late.”

Lucille motioned back towards the brick building that held I Love Lucy’s skeletal remains,

“Hell, We’ve broadcast to a million other homes with a million other men beating a million other women from this very place. So what I need to know, Ms. Dawson, is what reasons you have for pursuing Viv. Because if you’re anything like what the health experts say about homosexuals…”

Lucille trailed off, forgetting where she was. She looked around a few moments,

“If you’re anything like what they say about homosexuals,” She whispered, “then you’re no different than Philip.”

“I know what you're getting at, Ms. Ball, and I’m nothing like him.”

“Show me. Show me you’re different. Why are you pursuing Viv? What do you see in her?”

Shay sunk into herself; thinking of an answer that would satisfy the red-head. The things about Vivian that came to mind came streaming in like music: the blondness of Viv’s hair… the complete falsehood of the stereotypes. The fact that she is traditional; not the all-flesh, no coverage tart that society paints her to be. The fact that she is beautiful; not the frumpy sidekick, the older woman, the other. To Shay, she was the star. And what if she was the only one on stage? The direction of Shay’s gaze would not change. What would bother her, did bother her, is that everyone else’s gaze inevitably would. Because there was something about an unaccompanied woman on a stage that caused men to make up for the lack of masculinity they see by squealing like pigs and using their hands to gesture the things they will do to that woman’s body when she steps away from the safety of the stage lights; when there is no light and no one but her. Shay stopped breathing for a moment whenever the camera stops it’s clicking. Without the world watching, did that woman feel she is important? No, no that is the wrong question. The right question is why could someone so valuable only see their worth on a stage? Why, when the lights darken, does this masterpiece of a human hide? Why? 

What did Shay see in her? She saw value in Vivian where she herself neglect to look, beauty in the things about herself that scared her. She saw someone where so many in the world saw a something. When I die, Vivian had once said, there will be people who send flowers to Ethel Mertz. They saw a black and white dream; a frumpy mirage. Shay saw Vivian; wanted Vivian. 

Shay exhaled, smoke caressing the April heat, 

“I see a woman,” Shay finally said, “that I’m falling in love with.”

The same grin mockingly emoted from Lucille and a waft of grey laughter touched the air.

“You’re a sick actress, Ms. Dawson.” is all Lucille said.

“Why don’t you give me a lesson than?”

Lucille grinned, “Fine. You want to know how to convince me?”

Shay exhaled without looking at Lucille,

“Not particularly,” she told the city skyline, “but it seems you’re going to tell me how to anyway. Go for it, Teach.” 

Lucille tossed her cigarette butt to the ground, started walking back to the building’s entrance. 

“I trust your hands didn’t always shake that way, Ms. Dawson.”

Shay stopped mid-drag; the smoke remaining in her now tightening throat. She waited.

“Stay away from the liquor, Ms. Dawson.” Lucille said as she walked away, “It’s what broke my marriage and I’ll be damned if it leads to Vivian’s next abusive relationship.”

“I haven't had a drink in three weeks. And I don’t beat women, Ms. Ball.”

Of all people, Shay didn’t understand why she was telling Ms. Ball about her liquid demons. Somehow, she felt she needed to defend herself. Ms. Ball had this ability to turn you into your own interrogator; simply by saying a few words in passing. It was an intimidating, maddening, desirable quality. The quality you would want to have in a Nazi prison guard and, adversely, a priest in confessional. 

“No one beats women, Ms. Dawson, they just put them in their place.” Lucille mocked as she walked away, “I know you feel like you finally have a reason to put the bottle down, saving Vivian and all, but there isn’t much that you can bet on when liqueur comes calling. Not even our children were enough to get Desi to put down the bottle… Philip Ober is a cruel man that Vivian was married to for far too long. But you have your own abusive spouse. He comes in a bottle and he beats you with the glass. I think you've been married to him just as long as Viv had been with Philip. So until your hands stop shaking, you haven’t proven me wrong. And I want you to prove me wrong, Ms. Dawson. I want you to show me that there is something in this world good enough to get people like you and Desi to put down the bottle. Show me, Ms. Dawson, then I’ll believe you.”

And Shay couldn’t be sure, but she swore she could see tears welling up in Lucille’s eyes as she shut the door, leaving Shay to simmer in April’s static-y heat and spin in silence like a forgotten record.


	8. Tired Eyes

May 29, 1960 - Vivian Vance’s Home

That night, Vivian dreamed of vaudeville. She dreamed of citrus-colored stage clothes that twirled around the grapevine frames of young, shimmering women. She dreamed of dark, coal-colored makeup around the eyes of young gentlemen and leotards fixed in the spotlight of an August-colored stage. She saw, half in sleep and half in twilight, the incandescent lights of the theater tied to the backs of great, white moths; soaring against a maroon velvet storm cloud. A song, one that Vivian had never once heard or sang on stage, came in a husky whisper, a pear tasting melody:

The sun’s in the sky, Dear, and now I have to leave  
These moonlight affairs are something the daylight can’t see  
And the bed that we made so long ago last night  
Is the one place I can’t rest, I know it’s not right

Four rose colored dancers kissed the stage with soft, caressing pirouettes, keeping time with the saddest and most mysterious song Vivian had ever heard. The dreamscape, slowly, like a closing flower, shifted from onlooking to involvement, for a wine colored dancer brought her to her and began slow dancing and singing to her:

Baby, your face is sweet and my tired eyes  
They’re crying and crying as I tell you goodbye  
But I will not wake you, Dear, and I will tell you why:  
Because then this pain would be too much to fight… 

And suddenly, as the dancer opened her mouth to sing another line, nothing came out. Her voice, caught somewhere in a chasm of fear, burned a wretched hole in her throat, a grey and orange maw. Like a marionette thrown about by an uncontrollable child, the dancer flung herself forward and then succumb to the flames, fizzing and popping with heat. All that remained of her was a collection of birch-white bone and mirthful costume. 

Suddenly the stage turned a dark red and, like an old testament sea, split and from it came a shark, only this shark was no fish. It was a man, his mouth full of jagged, rotting teeth. His fingers were lit matches; burning away at the skin, down to the white bone. His eyes two spiral twists of scotch and lemon. 

It was Bill.

And as Vivian tried to scream, there was only silence. The fabric of the dream tore, clashing with a violent background of nightmares and terror. Vivian woke in a jolt of sweat and tears, rocking herself and screaming as loud as she could, as long as she could till her throat closed up from exhaustion and shock.

And as she shook, she cursed herself for the arms she craved to rock her back to sleep.

Without even thinking, Vivian’s arm reached out in the dark and grabbed hold of the phone on her nightstand. Dr. Steele would be unavailable, she knew. So she called someone else, someone unexpected. Why? Vivian wondered. Why this person? Why are my fingers dialing and doing so as if I’ve called this person a million times? Why tonight?

Why now? Why ever?

The answer to all of these questions was that the dream shook Vivian to her core. And how could it not? To think that even her dreams were not safe from Bill tore the only normalcy and sanity Vivian had held onto to shreds. She fingered the slices of life in her shaking hands, something that all people who have gone through trauma have done, and cursed herself for being so incapable of putting them back together. 

The phone’s dial tone made her forget the reasons and she listened in, hoping they picked up, dreading that they would. 

The click of attention; and suddenly there was a voice.

“Hello?”

Vivian held her breath.

“Hello? Hello?”

On the other end, Vivian could hear Shay’s faint breathing, her cigarette drags and foggy exhales. She didn’t answer, she just listened.

“Who is this?”

“Vivian.” She heard herself choke out.

The line was silent for a few moments, grey moments of smoke and silence and fear. There was a warmth too.

“Viv…” 

The sound of static and tobacco burning reached Viv’s ears and it was not unlike the hiss of boiling water in a pot: exciting, demanding and warm. It was the way she said it that made Vivian’s lips tremble: so confidently; so sure. Like she had known this night would come and had sat in the dark; smoking out the doubts in Vivian’s head till she knew she had to call. Her voice awakened her more than the dream ever could, put her more on edge. It was as if the horrors had not ended when Vivan had opened her eyes and reached out to the darkness above her head and at the atmosphere of reality and principle that only daylight can truly give, but when Shay had picked up the phone and called her out of her thoughts. Viv… spoken so warmly and confidently… so casually, as if they were trying to schedule a game with their bridge club, as if this were normal life, when they both should have been terrified to touch the dials in the first place. 

“I don’t know why I’m calling.”

“Fine.”

“I know it’s late.”

“It is. But that’s alright.”

The line was silent for another minute.

“I need to know something,” Vivian whispered into the phone.

“Alright.”

“Do you know… what happened to Bill that night? After you got me the cab?”

The line settled for a moment, then jumped suddenly again as Shay spoke.

“I don’t know exactly.” She cautiously started, “But Ms. Ball told me he’s alright. He’s staying at his sister's. Doesn’t go out for anything but a pack of beer and cigarettes.”

“He’s still drinking?”

“What else would he be doing?”

Vivian nodded into the phone. Why the hell did she care whether or not he was still drinking? Had she been secretly hoping the answer would be yes? That he was pushing himself closer to death? It wasn’t an absurd idea to Viv; who still had the pale, sweat coated face of her attacked stitched to every thought.

“...can I see you again?” Shay whispered between drags.

Outside her window, Vivian watched a car pull into the drive. She shut her eyes and held the receiver close; a buzzing like honeybees against her ear. She didn't want to be here right now.

And Lucille’s words rang in her head: ‘If you need a woman…’

“Yes.” she whispered as the front door opened, “We can see each other again.”


	9. Anything Goes for the worst sinner's on God's green earth

June 11, 1960 - The Silk Corner Club

The Silk Corner Club was one of many underground gay bars in California. But it was the first that Vivian ever went to. Shay had lead Vivian through the back kitchen area of an Italian restaurant and down into a basement area decorated like a first-rate casino. It was absolutely marvelous!

“We can leave.” Shay whispered, “If this is uncomfortable.”

Vivian looked around, charmed by the tasteful, the scandalous, the boyishness of the girls and femininity of the men. She loved it! She absolutely adored it! Oh, Mama would have hated it. And so much finer this place seemed to Vivian because of this reason.

“Believe me,” Vivian spoke, “it’s nice to finally be a patron rather than a performer at a place like this. After all, I already committed my crimes, having sung in a speakeasy when I was younger. My fate is sealed. I want to enjoy it.” 

And she kissed Shay, more forcefully than she usually would for a first kiss, and strode in as if this place was the stage she was destined for from birth. She belonged here, how odd but true that felt to Viv. Places like this, let alone people like this, weren’t supposed to exist, and yet it was the most appropriate habitat she could think of for herself. And in a moment of foolish confidence, Vivian turned back to look at Shay and give her a douse of her own medicine: a sensual, teasing smirk.

“What’s wrong?”

“Why did you kiss me just then?”

“I wanted to.”

“Vivian, you’re not the first woman I’ve brought to a place like this… You’re not the first woman I’ve kissed but you are one of the first woman I’ve let myself feel something real for and not just something pleasurable; something bound to wear thin. From you, I want more.”

As Shay said those words, Vivian let them follow the only track ever laid down in her mind: sex. Shay wanted what Vivian knew eventually would be asked for. Sex with another woman? Vivian knew how it worked--barely. She had heard, glimpsed, and tried not to be interested in the process all her life. But she was an actress and a fabulous improviser. She would figure it all out along the way.

“More in what ways?” Vivian asked, knowing the answer. 

“More time; so much so that I wish we had met years ago. More courage; so that I could do for you everything you want and need. More patience… Because I know how foolish that all sounds… I know it isn’t fair to expect that of you. But it's what I want none the less.”

Vivian’s brow furrowed.

“So I'm not attractive to you,” Vivian stated flatly.

“Vivian,” she whispered, her smile oven warm and their foreheads pressing into each other, “you’re my ideal.” 

Vivian laughed, a full, real chortle that Shay thought absolutely musical, 

“Shay, you yourself have worked with actresses. You could worship any young, beautiful up-and-comer out there. I know you can't be telling the truth, only trying to flatter me.”

And you don’t need flattery, Vivian thought to herself, Just ask for what I owe you. But Shay just split her mouth into its mirthful grin and chuckled, “Who? You mean Ms. Ball? As attractive as she is, I couldn't bring myself to love her. Oh, I’ve never understood actresses. I mean, what is like, knowing you're beautiful?”

Vivian laughed quietly, “Well, with the people I’ve worked with through the years, I used to think that knowing you were beautiful meant you were vain. People like Lucy always come off that way till you really know them. But now, I think actresses count their beauty as one of their assets. It's a commodity that helps them get where they need to be. You're more likely to be in the spotlight that way. I always wanted to be in the spotlight when I was younger… Now I see I don't belong there.”

“You’re too important to be anywhere else.”

“No... No, I don't think that's true. Every character is important.”

God, how long had she been feeding herself that line?

“I didn’t mean on stage.” Shay said, staring down into her tap water like it was the Mariana trench, “I meant in life.”

“Why did you protect me that night at the studio?”

Vivian looked at Shay with greyish, implementing eyes, not asking, but rather stating the truth as she believed it: Shay wanted what every other person who had ever spoken kindly to her had ever wanted. And it wasn’t some pleasant evening out for a drink. If women who wanted women were anything like men, Shay was playing the game beautifully. And Vivian knew where they would be at the end of the night and the kind of pain she would be expected to ask for.

Because she was flesh, and the world was constantly hungry. 

“I’m not that kind of person, Vivian. I did not protect you in order to get something in return.” Shay said seriously.

“If you were a man--”

“I am not like that, Vivian. What Bill was trying to do was criminal and vile. I stopped it. I didn't think about what I could get out of it; out of you. Most men won’t listen to the person behind the flesh that they’re craving. And they take things that aren’t theirs to take and break them like porcelain dolls in the process.”

Shay spoke those lines as bitterly as Vivian imagined possible. And Vivian was astounded by how Shay’s fears and certainties about men and sex mirrored her own. And a twinge of guilt rose up in Viv when she thought about what she had just been assuming about the woman next to her. The taste of acid in the air that Shay had stirred with her words were evidence enough to Viv that Shay was not like the men in Viv’s past who had smiled and paid the bill and waited for repayment. And suddenly Vivian realized that inside Shay was a young woman who had once been wide-eyed and optimistic, just like Viv had been, but was now certain of the truth that was betrayed by a spiked drink, a dark alley, or a faulty lock on an apartment door. But Vivian still asked the question that was on her mind:

“Then why did you do it?”

Shay sighed, “Has everyone who’s ever done something good for you demanded something from you?”

“They don't have to. I always make sure to even out the score somehow. Has everyone you've ever done something good for not done something for you in return?”

Shay twisted in her bar stool and faced Vivian, her dark arm resting on the counter with her beautiful wrist twisted upward and holding a cigarette.

“Vivian, the weight that would have been on my conscious had I left you there would have been my punishment. The leith feeling in my heart for helping you is reward enough.”

“Everyone wants something.”

“I already told you, Viv.”

“Told me what?”

“I want you.” 

Vivian laughed bitterly, “You could get more for your money on a street corner. And have someone who played the part.”

“Who said anything about money? I don't want that from you. I just want you.”

Thus made Vivian grow quiet. Without meaning too, Vivian started crying and cursing herself for even caring what someone like Shay would feel for her. Shay changed the subject. 

“Did your parents love each other?”

“Maybe later, but Mama settled for Daddy…”

Shay nodded; took a drag.

“You said you had a college degree?” Vivian whispered, trying to shield the hitch in her voice.

“I have a bachelor’s degree in law from Spelman College in Atlanta.” Shay answered, “I was going to be a lawyer.”

“Why aren't you?” 

“A homosexual person can't be a lawyer.” 

Vivian nodded; feigning understanding. 

“I met a girl my senior year there. She was so beautiful, so smart... She wanted to be a dancer. The campus was very small and was surrounded by some tough neighborhoods.

Every night I walked her back to her dorm after dance class. Her dorm was a good hour walk from my flat.” Shay began to laugh softly, “I guess that's how I knew I had really fallen for her.”

“So what happened?”

Shay took a sip of her drink and returned to stirring it with her finger.

“Every night, the walk took longer. We would walk slower, take side streets, stop at the drugstore for a coke. One night, she invited me to the dorm. I followed her up the stairwell, past the other rooms, and when we got to hers we just stood there. Neither one of us could think of what to say because we both knew that to say what we felt would mean ending it right then and there. So, without saying a word, I leaned in and kissed her. I can’t even tell you how wonderful that moment felt, to be able to show her everything I had felt for her for the past weeks. And when I felt her lean into me, I just knew that this was real. Things were wonderful for a few weeks but, looking back, I think we both knew it could never work. Eventually, someone reported us. Her parents withdrew her from the school the very same day. I never saw her again.”

“What did you do?”

“I nearly lost my degree. But my grades spoke for themselves. They let me graduate but I was stripped of every award, every merit and every law office in the state was informed of my immoral behavior. I had no choice but to leave town. I was penniless, without family, no friends to speak of. I couldn't find any kind of work other than janitorial. I was a janitor at the studio before your show bought it. The crew kept me on since they needed all the help they could get."

“You know what I was doing for my college years?”

“Necking with a dull musician and keeping my ear to the ground for gunshots while I sang in the speakeasies. Your girl sounds much, much better.”

Shay chuckled,

“Yeah,” she hummed, “She was something else, that girl. Something too good to possibly be true… Tell me about your ex-husband, Vivian.”

Vivian laughed. It was the kind of laugh that verged on tears, the kind of laugh that came from the need to disguise pain. Vivian had known this moment would come, when Shay would want to know about her divorce. Viv bit her lip and started in: 

“I guess I thought I didn't deserve better than him.” She sighed, “Even from the beginning we weren't happy, not genuinely so. But we were terribly in love. Ours was a nervous sort of love, a little bird that I trapped in a cage and told myself would be happy locked up with only kisses to nourish it. But love and romance were not enough, not when you were married to a man like Philip. But I stayed and I was a loyal, good wife because that's what I believed could fix him. Because he had a bad temper and beat me sometimes. Often over thinks I couldn’t remember doing, let alone grasp why they mattered. But I’m adaptable, almost unhealthily so, and I stayed and tried to fix someone who wasn't really broken, just horribly unkind. And even as I told myself how much I loved him, those words rang untrue. And eventually, I just kind of decided to leave. It wasn’t anything too monumental like you always see in movies when the battered wife defiantly rises up to her abuser, or a dashing man comes to sweep her away. It was more like when you poor honey from a pot, and it is so slow and sweet and enticing. That was how I chose to leave Philip: Slowly… with a distant but sweet thought in the back of my mind that maybe something brighter could come along.” Vivian paused, a painful, sugary smile painting her mouth, “I guess you could call it faith…” she whispered, “but I’m not religious enough to call it that.”

“So you just chose to stay? All those years before leaving him really?”

Vivian shook her head, “Choice’ isn't how I would describe it. It was more like, after so long, I guess I just believed I belonged to him. Truly, he did have his good qualities. He surprised me sometimes, how loving and tender he could be. But I know now that only would he show me that side of him if I was complacent, living every moment of my life by his rules. He controlled who I spent my time socially, which family members I stayed in contact with, what I wore on outings… Everything about my life was run through his filter.”

“I could never live that way.”

“Of course not. You’re brave.”

“And you aren’t?”

“In order to be brave, you have to be human. How was I supposed to think of myself? Philip never gave me the chance to think of myself as human. I was property. Even now… I still feel like he owns me.”

Suddenly, Viv wondered if it was just the wine that was making her feel so comfortable sharing these truths. But her tongue hadn’t even taken a drop of it. Everything about this woman was so colorful, alive. She was so exotic, from her wardrobe of men’s clothes to her smell; a warm breeze carrying the scent of pines. Shay seemed to exist in a different time like her very presence was a defiance to the world around her. She moved with power, spoke like she knew the truth. It made Vivian feel like she could do the same.

“This place, I like it,” Viv whispered with a grin.

“It's great, but discreet for a reason. Not everyone here wants to be exposed if you know what I mean. This is one of the only places people like us can come.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most people look at people like us and they see deviants; immoral people who don't deserve jobs or rights. Many people feel we’re psychologically off. Not right in the head, you know?’

Vivian nodded, “Yes, I know.”

“They think we're nothing but a bunch of criminals, murders, and pedophiles.”

Shay gulped her water hungrily and exhaled, “And not a day goes by that we--the older ones--don't remember that.”

Vivian cleared her throat, “When did you realize you were… this way?”

Shay took one more sip of her tap water.

“I sometimes think I was born this way for a reason, to protect women from men like him, men with bad intentions. It’s a good way to think about it anyway. But on my bad days, I still feel like such a sinner. And on my good, I feel like an angel who's just got a different way of looking at things.”

“Helping women isn’t a sin.” 

“No.” Shay whispered, looking up from her glass, “But falling in love with one is.”

And that was when Vivian took one of the first real risks of her life: “Could we…” she whispered, “Do you want to dance? Just for this song?”

Shay flashed that same half-moon smile from a week ago, “Very much.” 

They slow danced together, the beautiful dragqueen lovingly singing the beloved love songs of the 1920s, just for them. The woman's voice was alto but smooth: "Blow your horn, baby doll and tickle the ivories. I feel like singing to those who are real gone tonight."

Shay locked eyes with her more than once, thanking her for singing the songs so equipped to lower one’s defenses. A little later, the band picked up the pace. 

“The Charleston!” Vivian exclaimed as the band started in with the classic piece. 

Vivian immediately grabbed Shay, pulled her to her, and the couple began to swing like a door on rusty hinges.

The Silk Cats swung that Night, but the real passion wasn't the instruments, it was an older couple, two women in their early 50s, that worked their sore bodies into a youthful frenzy. The musicians sensed the need to keep up the mood and followed up The Charleston with In the Mood, and finally, Body and Soul in the style of Coleman Hawkins and their joints settled into the slower waltzing.

God, Vivian thought, it felt like warm rain, the saxophone and the soft light of this place. Like she had never left Independence, or her Mama, like every year since 1929 had vanished in a cotton-y silhouette of sound. And down the way, past the darkened entrance to the club, a world that did not know them or that they existed wheezed onward. Society now, in towns such as these that weren't good for that hippie talk, were left back broken and irrelevant. The nature of the streets at night was that of a sputtering machine; a moonlight model T ricketing along in the darkness. You could hear it, from The Silk Corner, where life was new and revolutionary, you could hear the ways of the past decaying like moth-eaten pages. Down those streets, the lights snapped on in apartments as men stagger in after boozing; shopkeepers slamming shut doors and grinding keys in locks. Dogs barked and snapped at the boys on their bikes who rode home after a neighborhood baseball game. Buttons came undone, makeup erased like old sketches on a chalkboard. People falling like snow to sleep in the darkness. They were like a thousand specks of magnetic dust moving this way and that for reasons they didn't understand. And now the dust settled to sleep and be dead to the world. 

But Vivian had never felt so alive. Because she was not one of those pieces of dust; no longer a spinning petal in a stream tossed this way and that with no say of her own. She was now, finally, embodied by her own self. And she was not those cast iron-black streets and dish soap milk trucks. She was not those lavender smelling, fresh cloth diapers, and sunshiny formulas. She was a discolored, yet beautiful Gainsborough; a piece of crystal dropped many times yet only ever cracked and not ever shattered; an unbreakable teacup. She was all these beautiful and vain and fragile things. And they were all things she was told not to be. And that, that was the reason she had to be them. Yes, Vivian was very aware that this, being here, with Shay, was a choice. And it meant so much more than just that: it meant that life went on even when you were told you didn't deserve to live. This was diagnosed as illness, lust, and sin. Love and lust were different things, Vivian knew, but could they exist harmoniously?  
Vivian pulled Shay’s arms tighter around her,

“You know,” Vivian interrupted the song, “Mama always said I was the worst sinner on God’s green earth. Maybe we were both born this way… And maybe that’s okay.”

“I think… I think it is.” Shay said between gasps.

Vivian leaned in and kissed Shay. And this time, it was real. And Anything Goes by Cole Porter echoed in Shay’s mind as she tasted the woman in her arms. Maybe, just maybe, she thought to herself, bad was finally becoming good. It was a nice thought, and it made Shay smile into Vivian’s mouth and pull her closer to her. And her heart sang.

Because this time, Vivian didn’t pull away.


	10. Withdraw... and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 1960 - Shay Dawson’s Flat

In the weeks that followed, Shay’s life passed her by like a Pollock painting. Each sunrise was a streak of red, each evening a black smear with nothing distinguishable about it.

And the stars seemed to vibrate as she watched them from the streets walking them each night, trying to entertain her brain as it sloshed around inside her head. This had become a habit for Shay, walking the oil colored city in the late night and early morning. 

The most beautiful and terrifying thing about sobering up was what it did to her at night; when work and life slept while she stayed awake. From Shay’s spinning brain came figments like wedding cake toppers. Men’s faces changed from faces to vaporous gas; steam like that from the fuming city grates. Women’s bodies melted into the sidewalk like fresh ice cream, sweet and syrupy. And most importantly, Liquor poured from the walls of the brick flats; dark, sweet, hoppy lagers; streetlights like martini olives. 

From open windows came the sounds of dance halls and Shay imagined the Jazz clubs in the city. She imagined the sweet tang of a gin n’ tonic, the kick of a whiskey straight, firecrackers in your stomach and silver serpents in your eyes. And each night Shay felt her legs carry her to town to walk past the Jazz clubs and the poorly lit bars...

And then she would imagine Vivian, see her face in the Pollock-like crowds; catch her scent as she passed a flower shop. And she would turn around and walk back to her flat without a word or a twist of lime on her tongue. All the while her hands shaking and quivering and her knees weak.

“You don’t have to do this alone.” Vivian had said to her one night.

“I can’t stand the thought of pulling you into this. It’s hell down here.” Shay had said curled in the corner of the flat.

Shay hadn't been able to keep food down for nearly two weeks. She looked noticeably thinner in her face. Her cheeks weren’t as bright and rosy and they dripped inward like little caves. Her eyes, like two pieces of riverbed slate, were as dead as ever. Vivian could hardly stand to have them on her. Shay looked like a starved child, with her eyes so sad and her body shaking from nausea and withdrawal. God, how long did this hell last before it released people? 

On the nights that Vivian could stay with her, Shay would wake up from a dead sleep and ask Momma not to leave with another money man. Oh, please, please don’t leave with the money man, the one that gives you the money after you go with him to his house. One night Shay screamed and sobbed over an invisible grave. A ghostly moan followed her sudden tears. “Told you not to go with the bad money man. He hurt you too bad this time.” On some nights, Vivian found herself crying too.

Vivian looked down at the woman on the floor. Some would have pitied Shay. But Vivian found her to be amazingly brave. Brave or hopeless. Vivian somehow struggled to tell which. But as Vivian sunk to the floor beside her; held her, felt Shay’s tremors as her own, she knew. Bravery; a fiery and fierce dedication to something impossible. She reminded Vivian of her Daddy, a man who often had to get two steps away from losing everything before straightening up; a shooting star that seemed to move so fast that he never knew he was one joyride away from suffocation. Maybe Shay was finally becoming aware of the mountain she had been running uphill her whole life. Maybe she finally understood that a steep plummet was close by and she was mentally digging in her heels; digging her fingernails into the soot and sand and dirt that were her gins and vodka tonics and bourbons and cigarettes. Each drink she had taken, each twist of smoke to funnel through her nostrils built into a sharp rise to an altitude never before reached. The mountain’s name was addiction; the quest to conquer it, recovery. And Shay was fixed upon the peak of this monster with not a desire or chance to look back.

What did the world look like, Vivian wondered, when your vision was fluctuating between reality and wonderland? When the most mundane things to the sober eye tipped back and forth between visions of heaven and hell? God, the dedication, the graceful fight she was attempting, it made Shay appear far more beautiful to Vivian. Even in this abstract fever she was suspended in, Shay was the most beautiful woman Vivian had ever seen. And if it was true that Shay was sobering up solely for Vivian, how incredible her love for Viv must have been, how pure, like a cocktail of pure light and love, 100 proof.

Vivian took Shay’s hands, guided her trembling arms like a martinet on strings. With their fingers entwined, Vivian wrapped Shay’s arms around her own waist and pressed Shay’s shaking hands to the small of her back. Shay felt Vivian unzip her dress; press Shay’s fingers against her bare skin. Shay took in a breath at the sensation; her senses on fire and every fiber in her trembling. And Shay finally realized that she wanted to drink nothing but love and get drunk on Vivian’s scent alone. In this one moment, Shay remembered what Lucille had said to her a few weeks earlier: ‘I want you to show me that there is something in this world good enough…’ And this was good enough. Vivian was good enough; amazing, heavenly, beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… 

And her lips were sweeter than the lip of a wine bottle; her breasts more full than champagne glasses and the color of pink Moscato. Shay wanted to drink from them; make love to the woman on the floor beside her with all the fever inside herself. She wanted to be so full of this woman that there was no room for anything else; not a liquor bottle’s drop worth of room. She wanted to overflow with Vivian’s pink wine skin and wrap her up like a chocolate covered fruit; sweet and sharp.

But she hesitated… a few seconds ticked by on the watch on Vivian’s pink wrist; thirty seconds of spinning, aching heartbeats. The two breathed into each other's mouths, their bodies vibrating like the stars. 

“Wait.” 

Vivian opened her eyes, her grip on Shay’s arms softened. The two looked at each other, eyes locked in the pitch black room.

“Wait…”

Vivian kept her eyes on Shay, slowly redressed. Shay swore she could see the gears in Vivian’s head spinning backward, adding logic to what she had just longed for. Vivian shut her eyes; her lips trembled. Suddenly she looked much younger than she was. Not that she looked more beautiful. It was a different kind of young, a less free kind of young, like a girl who, scraping her knee after falling, is scolded for running; for being a child. It was an odd, saddening, sudden change.

“When I first came to New York... I guess I didn't understand the city; the people. Mama always said I shouldn't look like a whore. If I did, bad things would happen.” Shay looked at Vivian, tried to understand, “Within a month of being here, a man flashed me on the subway. I knew it was because of the way I looked. Later, when I was in New York, a politician asked me to a party he was hosting in his hotel room. When I got there, it was just him. He locked me in and I spent an hour trying to keep him away before he finally gave up. When I was in vaudeville, a drunk chased me through a hotel with… with his pants down and no one even tried to stop him. And vaudeville men, in general, are lowbrow and lewd. They think that if you play their sweetheart on stage than surely you love them offstage as well. A scene from a cheap production where you kiss a man translates into sex when the curtains close. And, like an actress reading a script, it doesn’t matter who you really are, what you really want. You’ve played the part too well and you eventually have to pay up. Eventually, after a beer or two in a dark tenement, you’re still their stage sweetheart. Only this time there’s no director to cut the scene short. You just have to get through it… But then I married a well-to-do New Englander - Philip - and I was treated exactly the same… At some point, you have to look at yourself from the perspective of others. That's when I realized mama was right; she was right about me. I was a whore… Why else would people treat me that way? I guess, I’m just so sorry Shay.” Vivian sighed the rest of her words, a long exhausted explanation, “I don't know what's wrong with me, no one does. But I'm wrong somehow. I'm so sorry for that.”

Shay could only imagine how many time Vivian had said these same words to herself, how many nights she had stood in the limelight of an Albuquerque theater; or in the intense heat of a Vaudevillian playhouse and thought of the woman behind the mask, the one that the audience, be it total strangers or her husband, could never understand. How many times, simmering in the heat of applause, had she questioned who she was? How many bone cracking swings had landed on her from her mother? How bruised must the soul become before it questioned its value? 

And Shay could practically see the young girl inside Vivian clawing at imaginary voices to comfort her; kings and queens to adopt her; peaceful storybook endings to rest in. She had been a victim of the worst kind of abuse: the kind that leads abused to see themselves as the abuser. Vivian had spent her whole life believing she was the one with the problem, that much was obvious. But Shay was beginning to understand the full extent of the damage now. And now things were becoming clearer: The boogeyman was gone, but Vivian kept searching under the bed. 

“It isn’t your fault that other people hurt you.” Shay said softly, “They made a choice and you shouldn’t take any blame for what they did to you. Vivian, everything you are… You aren’t any of the things your mother says. Believe me, I can see you…”

Shay put her arms around Vivian, held her.

“This,” Shay whispered as she pulled Vivian closer, “This is what I want. But I don’t want our first time together… I don’t want to still be struggling with this.” Shay whispered, “I don’t want anything to distract from you, Vivian Roberta. I want to be sober, completely. Just like Lucille suggested.”

“And you think you need her permission?”

“It’s not that, Vivian. I’ve been an alcoholic since before I can remember. Seems like as soon as I was done with a feeding bottle, and my hands got big enough, I picked up a whiskey bottle. When I was at school, I couldn’t even go to class without taking a finger or two of liquor beforehand. I think Lucille is right, I need to straighten up. If for no one else, Vivian Roberta, than for you.”

Shay sat up, shook her head back and forth, 

“Never again…” she whispered, “I will never drink again.”

“I’ve never doubted you. I trust you’re going to get better.” Vivian whispered.

“Thank you for not leaving me.”

“You never need to worry about that.”

“But I do. Because I don’t want to hurt you the way he has.”

“You are nothing like him, Shay, nothing… I can’t tell you how different; how unbelievably different you are from that man.”

“If I ever become anything like him, promise you’ll leave.”

Vivian tilted her head down and looked Shay in the eyes.

“I’ve slept with both angels and demons, My love.” And she kissed Shay on the lips, whispered her last words of the night against the curve of her neck, “At the end of the day, we are all a little bit of both.”

* * *

If a peaceful night sleep would have helped push the doubts, the fear of being discovered from Vivian’s mind, she was positive that was why she was still awake.

The sound of seconds passing, tickling like a gently brushed piano key, was a small disturbance to the thoughts tumbling ‘round Vivian’s mind, emotional cement in a grinding mixer. Vivian had laid on her back for hours in the darkness, her eyes excavating the blackness above her like a deep sea trench. She half expected the silver glint of eyes to show up in the plaster…

Philip snored beside her, and had for the past seven hours, his breathing heavy. She turned her neck to face him and watched his chest sink and then recover. He was in his blue and white pinstripe pajamas with the comforter up to his chest, his arms crossed like Dracula’s over the sheets. His lips parted beneath a pencil-thin mustache, his mouth outlined by deepening indents in his cheeks, highlighted by the shadows of early morning. He had once looked so good to her, so handsome and kingly with his New England accent and suits tailored specifically to his body. Now the severe, dark eyebrows that met over his wide nose made him look so displeased with the world, so agitated at the directors that gave him small speaking roles and then sent him back to the stage with a word about his abilities, a slight about his never being a leading man. He wore his disappointment in dark circles and crow’s feet. His thinning hair was like his weakening faith in the world. And his growing appetite for drink was like his growing hatred for the stage once considered heaven on earth. And though Vivian would never tell him this, Philip was past his prime, outdated, likely to stay out of work.

Vivian pulled herself out of bed in the greyness of night. She touched her heels to the floor, the wood stiff as she softly padded her way to the bathroom. The light from the streets cut a path into the wood floor. She touched the walls as she went, felt the terrycloth of her housecoat and pulled it from the hanger, slipping it on as she walked to the door and slipped into the hall. She held her breath on the stairs, the uncarpeted steps groaning its disapproval of her early morning harassment of them. She shifted her weight on a wood, quieting it, and it troubled her how easily moving undetected, slyly slipping through the large house was. She remembered the nights in her early years she climbed from her window on the second floor, making her way to perform in the plays Mama had banned her from and whipped her for auditioning for. How she thought those days were gone. And here she was, creeping from the stairs to the front door, palming the keys to the Cadillac on their hook.

The air was still chill, smelling of the after hour affairs of a city still, after so many years, exotic to her. In the deep, shadowed blue Vivian, in curlers and housecoat, descended into night. The neighborhood did not wake at the sight of her, did not alert the world of her plans with the yowling of dogs and distant sirens. Even dusk seemed to know that she needed this time, this escape, and with a black cape and dim stars shielded her from notice. She touched the air with a soft ‘Thank you,’ and stepped into the Cadillac, pushed the key in the ignition and turned it smoothly. She put the car in reverse, leaving Philip to sleep and, as he did so much of his waking life, dream. Rolling back out of the drive, Vivian thought of the growing cavern between them.

The very real divorce they had undergone was nothing compared to the distance that they kept trying to minimize amidst them now. Not because they loved each other, or ever truly had without spur, but because show business was like war. You needed allies, you needed cautious connections. Navigating the interconnected labyrinth of Vaudeville had proven this to Viv, who had just as often performed in hotel rooms as she had on stage. Philip had been an established stage actor when Vivian, freshly divorced from her second husband George Koch and carrying a load of pressure from a hometown that had hemorrhaged hope and money, (and as Mama would say, faith and principle) to get her to New York, laid eyes on him. Handsome as her father and controlling and dominating as Mama, Vivian was swept up by him. 

Philip was still in her life for the same reason a tick was to always be on a stray dog. And she truly had been a stray when she had met Philip, estranged from her zealot mother and trying to find herself amongst the characters she played. And he had been the tick that latched on and made her believe she needed him, sinking into her and making her feel that she was his and that everything was fine. 

Time ripped past them like a runaway train, years spent irritating each other, bruising each other's skins and egos, and in the heat of a mid-life venereal summit they spun like a top on the edge of a table; making love with a desperation befitting death row inmates. Need, need, need. Their love was nothing more than the moldy bread thrown out and gobbled by the destitute. It was as satisfying as watered down champagne. 

Yes, Vivian had realized a long time ago that she had spent nineteen years married to a man who was indifferent about her. She would have preferred hatred. The greyness of his dispassion for her existence was far worse.

What a difference there was between Shay and Philip… As different as the air could be after a heavy rainstorm, as different as the grass felt after dew had wet it. And yet Vivian knew she could never truly accept that her soul mate was Shay Dawson, the strong, beautiful black woman that held herself with all the grace of a knight upon a steed. Vivian thought of how Shay seemed to love her without expectation, her kiss always hanging just a half inch away, waiting for Vivian to accept if she wanted it. Shay didn’t want her to try to please her. She just wanted to love her. And that was perhaps the most terrifying of all explanations. To think, after a lifetime of striving, that one could love you regardless, was like opening a long forgotten hope chest and peeking in on the dreams of your young self (for all children want to be loved unconditionally, only when we are adults do we stopping believing in love such as this). Shay was the living, breathing proof that Mama had been wrong. Vivian wasn't a disgrace if someone felt her to be incredible beyond words. And Vivian wasn't hellish if someone could experience heaven in her arms and her in theirs. It was terrifying because Mama had been a Goddess of fire, and to question her was to be punished. Could Mama strike her down from beyond the grave? Had Mama been so manipulative that she could convince God to punish her for the crimes only she and Shay knew? 

But there was also a pull, an emotional static from her megaphone heart wishing to bring to life the symphony in her soal; the lavender melodies that had always been there: the soft solo of Florence’s kiss and the crescendo, the overwhelming sound, the knee-weakening cymbal crash of Shay’s heart slamming against her own. She wanted to rip from her lungs the song so long stifled, throw it to the critics in their fake furs and imitation pearls, fool's gold watches and pop cap cufflinks, yelling ‘Here! Here is what I am! I don’t care anymore! Tear me to shreds! Eat me alive! But you can never take this from me! Never!’ And they would growl, cheap cigars clenched in fangs before her. They would pounce, she knew they would. They would claw their way from the cheap seats and balconies and bloody the stage with her honesty, spread like red satin over the Vaudeville floorboards. 

Or maybe she would run from the hordes of the civilized, live in the mental wilderness of cheap tenements and midnight dance halls, cheap cigarettes in the pockets of a hand me down cloth coat. Maybe she would become an old maid, like Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life, sexual as a translucent jellyfish listless upon the beach. She knew neither would suffice. Her appetite for love had kicked into survival mode and she now felt the need to binge on any soft caress and tingling sensation she found, to feist on the delicacies still revered as gross and animalistic. What a cruel way to live, she thought. To gorge oneself on love in all its indecency until detected and then to be thrown into an institute to stave again. What if she couldn’t survive? What if love was too strong for her palate? What if she just twisted the wheel and accepted what she deserved… 

Because she didn’t want to go home. A soft, yellow burn of golden street lights, turquoise dawn with icy white clouds. She saw it and hated it. Morning pouring through the glass in the upstairs window and gleaming off her silver watch on the bedside table; 4:52 AM by its hands and still stubbornly ticking forward. No, not another night like this, not another morning. 

No. Don’t let the bastard win, not Phil or Bill or Mama; Not anyone. 

Love, love, love. Let it find a way. 

And for the first time in Vivian’s life, it seemed there might possibly be a way…


	11. Shrug and Love Quietly

July 8, 1960 - The Silk Corner Club

Let’s do it! by Cole Porter was played by a smooth saxophonist in a lovely sequin dress, and lovely Lauretta, in her dark purple cocktail dress, sang an octave lower than any other woman Vivian had ever heard, giving the song a soft jungle hush, a papaya-sweet huskiness… 

Tonight, Viv and Shay had come with a group of friends: There was Paul Westley, a men’s wear designer; Gloria Manelli, a rather intimidating woman who participated in female boxing every Saturday. Vivian was always reminded of Barbara Stanwyck’s character in ‘Baby Face’ when Gloria was around.

“God, reminds me of my hometown. Love the oldies,” said Gloria Manelli as she straightened her Wembley canary yellow tie and tossed her Stetson grey-blue hat onto the table carelessly. 

“What song is this?” asked the young dyke at the barstool next to her.

“It’s Let’s do it! by Cole Porter, the pianist, and songwriter. He’s blue as a whale. I heard that in his heyday he’d invite marines over to his house ten at a time and suck them all off straight in a row.”

“Jesus, Gloria!” Paul moaned out between the drags he took from a cigarette on a slender, tubular holder. Vivian swore it was made of Mother of Pearl. 

Gloria shrugged and twisted her head towards the dance floor, her eyes watching the fleshed mass like an astronomer watches for an eclipse. 

“Well, someone has to do it. Lord, knows I won’t!” And her eyes trailed up the dance floor to focus on a youthful blonde. 

“Excuse me, folks, but before I’m blitzed I’m going to have a chance with that pretty young thing.”

And Gloria was gone, making her way to the dance floor with shoulders back and without a hint of sway to her boxer’s hips. 

She spotted him on a barstool at the far end of the bar. His crisp, buttoned suit with perfectly pointed collars, his greyish fingernails, the way he staunchly observed the crystal bourbon in his hand as if trying to find a hundred different metaphors for the oily thing. It all left Vivian with one conclusion to draw: This man was a writer. Not just a writer,

Vivian thought as her eyes trailed down to the man’s shoes, worn down as if he had walked the subways of New York and the fields of some farm country without even bothering with his footwear. 

He was a newspaperman. 

And he was at a gay bar. 

And he sat alone in a corner as if… observing. 

Vivian felt her body straighten, her eyes slam into focus as if she were a giant typewriter whose platen had just snapped back to start a new line. A newspaper man at the Silk Corner. And she a famous TV star with no right or reason to be here. Dear God, Vivian thought, Oh dear God what if he knows…

Vivian felt herself stand and start to leave. Shay’s hand gently came up to her elbow, bringing Viv back to reality as her touch always could.

“What’s wrong? Where are you going?”

Vivian shook her head, her eyes never leaving the crisp, inky man with his drink in the corner.

“If it’s what Gloria said, I don’t think she even thought about it before she said it. she’s just not used to being somewhere where she can…” Shay stopped, her lips shaping the next word as if you were painful to say, “exist. None of us are.”

Shay lightly touched Viv’s arm. She flinched.

“It’s not your friends.” Vivian whispered, “There’s a newspaperman here.”

This was when Shay finally followed Vivian’s gaze. She seemed to recognize the man sitting there all alone. Her brow furrowed as she looked back to Viv. 

“Who? John Dodds? You don’t need to worry about him. He’s here tonight for the same thing everyone else is, and it’s not the liqueur if you haven’t guessed by now.”

Vivian laughed nervously, that stale liqueur Shay jested about still resting on the tip of her tongue, making the laughter come a little easier than it would have otherwise. Shay placed her warm hand on Vivian’s waist. She leaned in to Vivian and whispered in her ear, every nerve in Vivian touched by her breath, her voice.

“I’ll introduce you if it would give you some relief. I know that man decently well. We’re not close friends. But I think he’ll remember me.”

“No…” Vivian pulled away and looked Shay in the eyes. “I’m okay, I promise. I just…”

She touched Shay’s waist, the tweed jacket she wore beautifully familiar. Like a child, her hands suddenly went all over: the woman’s cheek, her arms, her waist, hips, and back to her cheeks. And Shay understood. She knew. Vivian touched her so softly, purposely, as if reminding them both of everything she would lose if she were found out. She couldn’t lose any part of Shay, not one inch, not one breath, not one scent. Shay finished Vivian’s sentence in her own head, and the word’s made her warm: I just can’t lose you.

“You won’t.” Shay whispered, “Just dance with me. Now. Here. It will be just us for a few minutes.”

Vivian nodded and they floated to the dance floor. Shay put up her left hand, her fingers shaking.

“Here,” Vivian whispered, and wrapped her palm around Shay’s hand, steadying it.

“How long has it been?”

“I haven’t had a drink in five weeks.”

“Since the day we met?”

Shay looked down at her, “Yes.”

Vivian smiled up at her, kissed her on the lips, “Thank you.”

Shay held her in shaking arms, “I finally have my reason to put down the bottle and glass. If I stop picking them up, I have more time to put my arms around you.”

They danced a few more songs before stepping back to the bar. When they reached their seats, the newspaper man with the bourbon, John Dodds, had taken the barstool closest to Vivian. As she sat down beside him, a warm smell of lavender hit her. 

“John Dodds.”

“Vivian Vance.”

“Oh, I knew that, ma’am. I was quite taken aback to see you here. But then, no one would suspect a quiet little editor to be a patron at a spot like this either.”

“You’re an editor?”

“Yes, ma'am. For a small publishing company up in Manhattan.”

Vivian nodded. So her first impression had been wrong. He wasn’t with the papers. Then again, when had her first impression of a man ever been right?

From that night forward, John and Vivian always kept an eye out for each other when they came to the Silk Corner. They almost always found each other and with a gentle, timid hug and a soft smile, the two would sit and strike up a conversation about work, politics, or Broadway. John had many friends in the Broadway theater. And it was the reason he took a job with a rinky-dink Manhattan publishing company. The only appeal of the job, he told her, was being so close to the theater. And, he said with a wink, the male actors. 

One of these evenings they struck up a conversation about marriage. John had been married once before, some well-off New Englander who attended Princeton and dropped out within a year. 

“Philip was from New England. White Plains. He also went to Princeton.” 

“Perhaps they knew each other.”

“Maybe. She was your only wife?”

“Could I have handled more than one, you’d see a ring on my finger. And you?”

“Three husbands. All cut from the same cloth.”

“God Lord, Viv. Three different men?”

“I was married three times. Men are an entirely different thing. I’ve never been a prude.”

“Nor I, dear. You can’t afford to be when love itself seems constantly to evade you. You eventually learn that you can’t be picky, or even play by the rules. I guess you’d got tired of us after so many affairs. We men aren’t really that appealing anyway.”

Viv laughed, “Oh, nothing like that. I just… I chose the wrong ones, John. Phil was the worst of them.”

John shook his head thoughtfully, “Yes, I saw it in the papers when it happened. ‘Claims of physical abuse and cruelty.’ Sounds like hell, Viv.”

“Only if hell has a two car garage and pool. We had everything. On the outside, anyway.”

“Ah, but now you’re with Shay. You’ve chosen well, dear. Shay is one of the swellest people I’ve ever met. She gave me a place to live after my divorce. I probably slept on her couch three months before I got back on my feet. Shay’s a kind of saint to me.”

“I didn’t know your divorce had been so hard on you.” 

John laughed in a queer way at this, pained but sincere, “She was a funny woman. Could never understand her.” 

He shook his head and his eyes went dark, “She raged at me and…”

“And?”

“Well,” John shrugged, “She just didn't understand that I couldn't... be with her; the way she wanted me too.”

“She didn’t like being with you?”

“She never was with me; not the way a wife wants to be with a husband. I told her I couldn't give her that from the beginning. I asked her if she wanted children, asked her if she minded giving up, well, you know, that part of married life. I thought she was content till she spilled me a mickey after a night of partying. Turns out, it hadn't been the first time. By the end of the marriage, she was doing that to me a few times a week. I was a heavy drinker at the time, a very heavy drinker. So it took me a while to realize what had been happening. When I finally figured it out, she ran off to Catalina with a busboy.”

“God, John, I’m so sorry.”

The man shrugged, “I suppose she didn’t think she had any choice.”

Vivian shook her head, thoughts of Bill and Philip thundering to consciousness. She spoke up then, louder and stronger than before.

“No, she did have a choice. She could have respected you and what you wanted and just divorced you. She didn’t need to… She had no right…” 

Viv’s voice went soft again. She shook her head and softly placed her palm on John’s arm.

“She’s a bitch, John, is what I mean. You’re better off.”

“Oh, she had her good moments.”

“Phil did too, but he was still a bastard that I should have divorced long before.”

John nodded. He then chuckled softly.

“I suppose we’re what you might call unlucky in love?”

Viv grinned, “Maybe. Even when you find someone you love,” Viv turned back to look at Shay, teaching a young dyke how to play pool, “it’s not like people like us can ever truly have what everyone else does.” 

John waved away her words, “Sure we can. In fact, we’re lucky. We don’t have to divorce people when things don’t work out.”

“I’m serious, John. We can't get married. Not to the people we love anyway. We can't leave a legacy with children or even hand over our estate to our loves because they aren’t our spouse. We can’t exist in the open because, as a rule, we should not exist to begin with.”

“I know, Viv. But what point is there in dreaming or even mourning for those things? We can only shrug and love quietly.”

“I’ve never been skilled at being quiet. Or discrete for that matter.”

“You’ll have to learn. You can’t choose to love a woman, or I a man, without being invisible.”

“I didn’t choose this. If it were a choice, I’m not sure I ever would have loved Shay.”

“Then it’s real, Viv. That’s how you know.”

The two were silent for a few moments, trying to steady themselves. Were they speaking of something joyful or sorrowful? Something worthy of discussion or just societal backwash? Besides, they had both been so unlucky in marriage… Why did it matter whether she could marry Shay and him his male lover? Just then, John spoke up.

“Perhaps we can help each other.”

“How?”

He smiled at her, a full and silly looking thing, “Why not marry me?”

Vivian couldn’t help but laugh.

“Think about it.” he said, “The rumors would stop and you and Shay could still be together.”

“The last time I married a man, I ended up with more black eyes than The Manassa Mauler.”

“Ah, but you didn’t marry a man, dear. You married a cowardly bastard. Besides, I won’t expect a thing from you. You won’t need to cook my meals or do my laundry or even fetch my slippers. You’d be independent, as you are now, merely my wife in name only.”

Viv was silent for a moment. He was right, of course. The rumors would stop and it would be far safer for both of them. Still, Vivian thought, the whole thing felt like she was being unfaithful to Shay.

“I’ll have to think about it, John. It’s a swell idea and all but…” She looked back to Shay, still playing pool with the young lesbian, “But I’m just not sure.”


	12. “Hands stopped shaking, Miss Dawson?”

August 23, 1960 - Shay Dawson’s Flat

Shay picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hands stopped shaking, Miss Dawson?”

Shay could hear children in the background; the bang of a congo drum every once in a while. The kids took after their father, They guessed.

“I’ve been sober for three months, though I don't know why I'm telling you.”

The line was silent a few moments. Lucille let out a smoky laugh; Shay could almost taste the cigarette on the woman’s jesting mouth.

“If only your ego was as shaky as your hands, Miss Dawson… But I like you. You know why? You got fight in you; alley cat style. I like that. So I'll tell you why I called, Miss alley cat, I called to check in on you, follow up on our little agreement.”

“As I said, Miss Ball, I've been sober for three months.”

“And Viv has been with you this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I see it fitting to give you a blessing of sorts.”

“You’re fine with Viv and me?”

“Consider me your starter's pistol, miss alley cat, just don't give me a reason to turn the pistol on you.”

Shay had figured it would be more difficult, that Lucille would have demanded that they meet; randomly appear at her apartment and check every cupboard and sock drawer in the house. But Shay figured that few people had the guts to lie to her.

And Lucille knew this.

“I misjudged you, Miss Dawson. I’d ask for you to forgive me but I don't see any reason to. I needed to be cold at first, you understand, make sure you weren't looking to hurt Viv… You know what all those head doctors say about people like you.”

“Yes, I know what they say.”

The line was silent a few minutes, children's laughter in the background.

“I hope you don't think I believe what those Psychologists say about homosexuals. I mean, most of the most talented people I've met are like you. It's just that… when you care about someone, you want to make sure they're taken care of.”

“Look, Miss Ball, I respect what you've done, looking out for Viv. She needs someone like you to help her stick up for herself. And while I can't say I've always been fond of you, I do respect you.” 

Shay could feel Lucille smirking against the plastic wall phone, “The feeling is mutual, Miss Dawson.”

And Lucille hung up, leaving Shay in the fresh, nauseating air of morning, crisp, genuine pride on her sleepy face.


	13. The Only Reason

February 27, 1960 - Shay Dawson’s flat

Six months later, against the cold, thin walls of Shay’s flat, heat filling the room, they made love. Softly it started, like the first falling of august-red leaves, spinning in magic dances as they came to sleep on the burned-green ground. The two women, soft creatures wanting nothing more than to softly reassure each other, moved like petals of a rose closing in on itself at twilight. Fingers so lightly traced jawlines. Collarbones like gentle valleys; tumbling hills of breasts and parallel curves of soft damp sand. 

And in these two women, these two so long neglected, malnourished souls, a hunger began to pulse. Burn. A flame, like a spark thrown from a cigarette to the August ground, began to dance wildly. With windy passion, the leaves stirred… 

It was for no one else but themselves that they kissed, for no one else’s pleasure but their own that they let themselves sweat against the floorboards of the winter flat. Their bodies curved together into the shape of a wedding ring; only much stronger.

They danced the timid, hungry waltz of new lovers. They felt their way, coy and tender, through the motions of new love-making: a thumb and forefinger first set upon the flesh of your lover’s arms. The thumbs tracing the sensitive inner skin, the fingers the outer. The fingertips rise as the prominent actors sensing the gentle tremble of the forearms as they curve, deliciously, in towards the breasts. Fingers shaped to tune a dial palm the tender flesh. The feel!; like a rose’s petals between finger and thumb. Enough to make a sculptor of any… 

They sighed at the freshness of it. They were virgins again, virgins in the way true loves will always be. For time is not as powerful as we make it to be. And the clocks must reverse when destiny wills it so. 

But when, in purple gasping, the two came up for air, a quiet settled between them and around them. A quiet that ripped through the air, stripped the perfume of their passion from their nostrils and threw cold water on the embers aglow. The quiet was maddening, sickening, screaming. Vivian heard it within her; slowly identified it. 

It was the sound of church bells, the sound of thresholds being crossed by married couples, the sounds of freshly born babies sleeping in their cribs, their mother and father not far from them. It was the sound of wives’ hands hardening under dishwater, of briefcases set down after a normal day at the office, a day where nothing interesting happened and the next fifty years lummed. She heard the sound of nothing; the way it changed to the sound of glasses clinking over conversation-less dinner tables; the sound of thick fists planting themselves in concrete; wives crying on kitchen floors…

That was what she heard, the sound of every long-married couple going through every long-tired evening routine, and falling into even older and more tired beds to sleep on opposite sides of the mattress; opposite sides of life. She felt the nothing; the nothing everyone believed lead to happiness but simply opened up to a larger void to fill. She felt what everyone told her she was giving up for divorcing Phillip. She sensed what she deserved: nothing. 

And here she was, stupid woman, feeling the vibrations of something; feeling and sensing and believing life could be bigger and grander and more beautiful than a white-frosted wedding cake. All because of this woman, this beautiful woman, life no longer had to be nothing, her body no longer a canvas smudged with blues and blacks and dripping, violent, angry reds.

But a dreadful cold crept in through the cracks in Vivian’s skin as she laid there, a cool and merciless reminder; a reminder that she was not a someone; nor could this be a something. Unconsciously, Vivian twisted the ring on her finger. No, this could not be something.

“You’re upset.” Shay’s voice was like rustling leaves, “I’m sorry.”

Vivian kept her eyes forward, focused on a crack in Shay’s apartment ceiling. How could Shay always know how she was feeling?

“Yes,” and tears pricked Vivian’s eyes, “Because he loves me.” she heard herself say, “And I love him.”

“Is that what he told you?”

Vivian didn’t look at her when she said this. Instead, she set her head on Shay’s chocolate shoulder and inhaled her.

“Yes,” Vivian whispered through her happy and terrible tears, “That’s what he told me.”

* * *

Vivian was the first to rise that morning. She lifted the sheets from her naked body and reached for her watch on the nightstand; the upturned milk crate that Shay used to hold her light and collection of banned books. 

9:45 AM. 

Vivian laid on her side. Shay’s finger’s lingered, tracing the freckle constellations that decorated Vivian’s back. 

“There’s a reason they call it making love.” She whispered, “Now I know why.” 

“That's why it finally felt right, with you,” Vivian whispered solemnly. 

Shay placed an arm around Vivian’s waist, spooning her. God, this was heaven, Viv thought, and turned over to kiss Shay. It was so lovely, how perfectly they fit together; their bodies like two distinct splendors that blended together as perfectly as coffee and cream. Vivian shut her heedful eyes, rested them; but all too quickly the world around Vivian became real again. Vivian knew what she was going to have to face later on. Vivian knew what was to happen. As Momma always had said, every sin will be punished in turn. 

Yes, this was heaven. But it wasn't eternity.

“I have to go.” 

“I know… To the studio?”

“To my house.”

Shay leaned up on her elbows. The sheets shifted, her breasts outlined by the thin layer of bedding. She looked up at Vivian like a parent does when they explain something to a very young child; something hard about life they should never have to know. 

“He’ll hurt you,” Shay whispered.

“Philip’s at work.”

Vivian zipped up her dress. Just as she was getting ready to leave, she heard Shay from the bedroom, her voice so soft that it could have easily been Vivian’s imagination.

“When I see fresh bruises on you every time you come over,” Shay spoke softly from the other room, “it either means he hates you too much to stop beating you, or you love me too much to stay away long enough for your bruises to heal.”

Vivian held her place in the doorway for a moment; two moments; ten ticks of her wristwatch,

“I know, Vivian. I know he’s still there, with you. And I can’t just sit back and watch him continue to hurt you... I love you too much for that.” 

Vivian held her breath.

“I love you and I want all of you; even the parts you don’t want yourself. I want all of you… even the scars. But you can’t keep bringing fresh injuries with you each time you come here. I can’t take it.” 

Vivian looked back, the bedroom door hanging open.

“Today,” She whispered excitedly, nervously, “I’m leaving him. Really.”

And she shut the door to the flat.

* * *

Vivian stepped from the back seat of the cab like an accused woman waiting for trial, stiff with the premonition of a guilty verdict. She was aware of the world watching her with their eyes behind the shutters of the homes on her street, those eyes always hungrily vetting. Once, it was an added pleasure, being able to watch the world and to be seen and envied by others. Now, like a zoo with all the cages open wide, it was something to fear. 

Her wedding ring, at least the one that had up until now been on her ring finger, and the simple band that Shay had placed there instead were the shackles that she wore across her guilty heart as she stepped up to the pavement of her driveway. The freak Culver City winter (20 degrees colder than last season) bit the skin around her eyes with a frigid blast of wind, making them water. Good, Vivian thought, tears show remorse. Even, she knew, when remorse was not what she felt.

Vivian scanned the vacant driveways and dark windows of the streets, all of which seemed more inviting than her own.

Grey and impenetrable the black iron gates to the house stood, crooked from the abuse of the wind. Icicles like carving knives hung from the windows where the lights in the parlor looked sickly, casting shadows on the dead things in the flowerbeds. Frost sliced the grass into brown stubble, poking just above the shallow snow and creating a ridge where it met with the drive, where perhaps the worst of all winter’s aesthetics lay sleeping: the salt-eaten Cadillac.

Philip was home.

Her mind cried out against the message in the brittle air: the accusations of her infidelity, her treachery against the all binding ties of matrimony. No appeal hung there in the cold air, no reason to be claimed. Was not infidelity the worst of all crimes when it came to marriage? 

Worse than abuse, the wind whispered, worse than cruelty.

She knew Phillip would demand evaluations on her mental health and diagnosis would be decorating the front page of the papers like Christmas lights, celebrating her descent into hysteria and mourning for Philip Ober: handsome, talented, and betrayed by his loony wife. She would be cast as the she-demon, the classic ‘torchy lady’ how lead men astray. Women too, the coldness of the air hinted.

She would be banished from the land of the lucid, flung like dirty laundry into a mental institute, sliced open for the juicy Hollywood gossip. Her mind, drawn to ‘gross indecency,’ as it would aptly be named in court, would be dissected, sliced with psycho scalpels, dug through. Sanity, decency would be spared. Her soul, her loves, her passions, faiths, beliefs would be replaced by new matter. Matters of home and God and country. Matters of dishwater and babies, of playing hostess for the beasts in the parlor.

Dull matters.

Dead matters.

Maybe, Vivian shivered, that was why the brain, analyzed separate from the soul, was called, simply, Grey Matter.

Of course, Vivian mused, that would only have happened if she was still married to the bastard, not just living with him. If she were still his wife, would Phillip have left her fate to a jury? As she opened the door to her home, she contemplated whether Phillip would have taken matters into his own hands. What could she claim? Oh, What could she claim? 

Insanity was the only reason. Vivian took a breath of the cold air. There it was, blown in the wind.


	14. Madness

There was no sudden change of temperature as the door to her home slide open, no blast of furnace warmth. The air inside was the same as the winter climate around the home, only stale, as if the warmth of the house and the cold of February had mixed and the result was a bitter brew. Vivian fingered her scarf in the entryway, shut the door behind her and slide her coat off, letting it pile on top of her scarf. She slipped her heels from her feet, padding into the living room.

Sheet music from the grand piano was strewn across the room, yellow pages like fall leaves covering the oriental rug as if flung from the stand. There on the floor was a messily composed number; Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To quickly changed pace, running up against Wilmoth Houdini’s Stone Cold Dead In The Market. My Man comprised with Blues In The Dark. Amidst the music, Vivian called Philip’s name. No answer. Just an echo becoming a different home than what she remembered.

The music crackled under her as Viv walked into the dining room. A vast oak dining table sat in the center of an elaborate room, backing up to the wall of windows. The table, usually empty and polished for the guests who never came, held one placement of China, gold trimmed and clean. It was set to the left, farthest from the head of the table. Surrounding the setting was an assortment of cups. Vivian looked down into them, picked one up off the edge of the table and inhaled. Scotch, the same foul odor she had smelled upon entering the house. Each glass held no more than a fingers’ worth of scotch. And Vivian knew, could almost see Phil dumping 6 or 7 fingers from the crystal decanter into each glass and drinking it down till some urge overtook him.

Following Philip’s movements, she came into the kitchen, which oddly seemed untouched. There were no dishes carpeted with sauces or shriveled scraps, no scent of cooking, no glasses on the countertop. Philip hadn’t cooked for at least three days, which meant he had been eating his meals out. And a constant fear, a silent film so outdated and so overplayed, clicked on inside her head: He takes out the pretty girls when you’re at work, the dark intertitles read, and dates the roobes because he doesn’t get what a husband needs from you. He kisses young girls in clubs and feasts on them for dessert. The film clicked on and on, and then repeated itself. And Vivian hated herself for caring and fumed at her inability to understand. He’s no longer your husband. You’re no longer his wife. This charade ends today. 

Vivian slammed her fist against the counter, bit back the tears. Her whole life she had tried to make everyone believe she was fine. Through three short-lived marriages, through overseas performances concluding in mental breakdowns, she had stared the world in the eye and refused any help. She had achieved success, she had sustained a marriage. But the roots necessary to keep things grounded: love, compassion, were missing from the start and the marriage fell apart. But her need to be near someone who would tell her, even if it was in fits of jealousy, violence, and rage that she was important, that she in some small but sparkling way mattered, did not go away. Philip had been unfaithful from the start and she could have cared less. And the divorce? That too had been about showing the world that she mattered. But now Philip was here alone in this house, and he had gone off and found someone else to show those things to. And Vivian was angry. She was fuming. Because their marriage had been an agreement, and he had just voided their contract. Vivian blinked at the hot tears and stared through the windows of the open galley kitchen. She saw the glass doors of the three season room open wide. Odd, Vivian thought. Why would anyone be using that door in winter?

Vivian approached the window. The pane gleamed with the frozen sunlight; ice shimmering in the corners of the cold glass and a pulsing imprint of her breath as it came and went against the cold frame. Through her breath, she could see the California landscape melting and pulsing. In the yard there was nothing green, it was mellow chromatic; brittle and fragile frosted like a marble cake of chocolate tree bark and vanilla-creme earth. It was as if winter had been filmed in black and white and was now being played through the kitchen windows of her home, a romantic backdrop with no lovers to kiss warmly against the cold. But Vivian squinted at the whiteness. She fingered the glass and brushed her nails over the frost. She scraped away the ice and starred.

Like whips of frosting, the snow gathered oddly in the center of the yard. She recognized her Barbara Hulanicki dress, the grey collar poking out above the snow. Then her vermilion evening gown with the azure sash just barely dusted with white. Her pumps and high heels like exotic flowers in a cold snap. Her whole wardrobe was strewn across the arctic landscape like dead bodies. 

Vivian’s breath, cold against the glass, immortalized one second then gone the next, stilled. She took in the catastrophe, the elegance of the soaking silk and shivering furs: foxes, minkes, and rabbits frozen to the spot. She studied the exotic, flowering footwear: golds, greens, reds, an early spring swept up in a late frost and felt sick. 

Philip had done things like this before: ravaging her things, embarrassing her in front of friends and colleagues, reminding her of her subverted state. He, in private, often poked fun at her career in television. I am the star, he would whisper bitterly with a scotch in his hand, I have earned the credit (as if performing was kin to obtaining a degree or paying off a debt), an acclaimed actor of the stage. What do you contribute to the art? Actress in a TV saga. That silly new medium to come and go, no doubt, like any other fad? That’s nice. Do you also dabble in finger painting? 

The first episode of I Love Lucy, it aired October 15, 1951. She remembered they had gathered at Marc and Emily Daniels’ house to watch the first broadcast. Emily was the camera coordinator, Marc their bold and visionary director for the first 38 episodes. In a modern, geometrically pleasing living room of clementine colors, Lucille, Desi, Bill, Emily, Marc and Viv, and Philip had sat, everyone’s eyes on the tube. Almost everyone’s… Vivian, terrified that Lucy’s threat of writing her out of the show if she wasn’t good enough would come true, had let her eyes sweep right and left after each of her lines, conducting a search for the telltale signs of approving recognition. Lucille, a chain-smoking poker player in her free time, kept those bowtie lips clamped down on her Philip Morris. If her face had been a heart monitor, the expression she wore was as ominous as a flatline and equally as certain. Desi laughed at several jokes but it was a self-defeating laugh, like when you drop your napkin at a restaurant and bend, sheepishly, to pick it up. Vivian hardly cared what Bill thought, and Marc and Emily more closely watched for technical errors rather than acting ones. The feeling in the room was as intelligible as murky water. 

But contrary to her fears, everyone critiqued themselves so severally, they hardly had anything to say about anyone but themselves. And while Wilbur Hatch brought the Desi Arnaz orchestra to a crescendo, the Desilu production logo sketched in cursive across the neutral grey of the screen, the oddest and no less unsettling thing happened. While all of them, actors and coordinator and director, sat there feeling lousing and imagining the flop that I Love Lucy was sure to become, there sat Philip, laughing so hysterically it scared Viv. He told everyone, loudly and with more New Englander timbre than usual in his smooth voice, that the show would be a hit, a big fat success. You’ve done it, damn it! You’ve broken through the stage curtain! In Home theater has just been given its Starry night, it’s Mona Lisa!; an entertainment revolution… Vivian remembered the feeling in her stomach as he pulled her, dominatingly, toward the door by her arm, a chivalrous looking act that Lucille, finally displaying some emotion, took notice of and clearly disapproved of. They left before anyone else, before the theme song of some other less revolutionary sitcom could stream into the room. “Coat. Now.” he had snapped at her in a hushed tone. She took hold of his coat from the back of the couch and, since others were watching, let him help her on with her own. 

He took the keys to her big, blue Lincoln from her and waited impatiently for her to get in the passenger seat. They drove like a shooting star through the dark night…   
When Philip and Vivian reached her tiny furnished apartment, the boxy, heatless room she slept in, he laid into her so badly she was screaming. He beat her till, she remembered, she had been convinced she wouldn’t be able to walk the next day. He was jealous, that was what she had realized after a session with Dr. Steele. She had been picked up for something that may have pushed her career farther than his. He just couldn’t stand the idea of Vivian’s career overshadowing his. Even though in the end, it did.

The bruises took makeup and lies and three weeks to heal. It was not the worst of the beatings, she reminded herself, but certainly it was a memorable one. But this, Vivian, noticed as she returned her mental gaze to the kitchen window, the pretty frosted jungle of clothing almost glowing, was something he had never done. This was more severe, more destructive. And the message was much plainer than a knuckled greeting when she tiredly came in the door. Vivian’s fingernails on the glass scraped further up the window, bringing more of the yard into focus. She scrapped desperately, trying to identify the items plush with white. Yes, she understood, for what he was saying was as easy to read as skywriting: he knew what she had done.

Slam!

Vivian jumped, the sound of heavy footsteps clanged against the stone entrance, padded over the carpet, and gave way to Phil’s frame in the kitchen doorway. He stood before her in an apelike stupor, drunk. For there was no other word to describe him. His tweed sports coat was a Pollock painting of scotch stains, wine blotches, and some other dark liquid. His white button-down dress shirt was undone nearly to his navel, his skin burned a bright red from the cold. His religiously greased halo of brown hair shot out from the sides of his head as if he had grasped at it repeatedly in an attempt to tear it out. One of his daily Cuban cigars limply hung from the drunk lips, burning blue and masking the dull eyes behind it.

Vivian looked at him and forgot for a moment who was standing in her kitchen. Was this her husband standing ragged and drunk on the linoleum tile? Or was it Bill: drunk, pale and pouncing like a fat albino tiger. She didn’t know. And if someone had asked her to describe what would happen next, she honestly wouldn’t have been able to describe the man’s face, just the terror that shot up like vines to ensnare her. She took two steps back and planted herself against the cabinets, her fingers trembling on the luster rock counter. Her stomach tensed, her body rigid like she had just slipped on damp earth and had stumbled into a dark body of water. She felt like gasping for breath. She felt like fainting. Instead, she focused her eyes and let them burn into Philip, partially to stay conscious, partially to see what he truly was. 

“Where were you last night?”

“Out. Friends.” 

Vivian cut the words from her mouth like chunks of granite, letting them land heavy and unquestionably from her lips. Philip slammed his fist against them and smashed the words to bits against the kitchen counter. The room echoed and she jumped at the tremor. She could feel it in the tiles beneath her.

“Don’t lie to me, Vivian.”

She expected him to yell. But his voice was a low, trench-y timbre. She could barely hear him against the hum of the overworked furnace, the buzz of the refrigerator. 

“I’m not lying. I’m allowed to go out and be with other people sometimes.”

It was the kind of thing you said to a jealous friend in grade school. Vivian tried to brace it,

“I got a little blitzed. I know you hate when I drink too much. I spent the night with friends so I could sober up before I drove home.”

Philip had stepped closer to her as she had spoken this, his heavy feet no more than five inches from her own. He touched her neck with a slick palm, fingers curved around the back of her head. 

“What kind of friends are you seeing these days, Vivi?” he whispered as he traced her jaw with his thumb, “The kind who rub elbows over Gin and Tonics while discussing politics?”

His hand moved, her neck turning into her cheek with his thumb just barely brushing the skin of her face, “Or other peasants like yourself? The kind of people who misuse the silver.”

He referenced the time she had used his mother’s silver to stir a dish she was making. The heated exchange ended with him chasing her with a cleaver. He said it was just a little fun, comparing the violent outburst to fox hunting. He kept at it, his tone a low hum, “Do you know what Katherine told me last week? Where she saw you?”

Vivian’s cheeks burned. 

“A club.” she choked out.

“What kind of club?”

Vivian shut her eyes, her lids burning with tears.

“Say it.”

“A… a fag club.”

Philip nodded.

“Right. A fag club. In the city. And that’s not all, Viv, is it? There was someone else. There was someone with you.”

He could beat her till she couldn’t stand. He could kill her. She would not give Shay up.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” He hissed.

Them. What did he mean? Homosexual? A dyke? A sinner? Who was she, really? 

“Yes,” she whispered.

Because at the end of the day, wasn’t she all of those?

He laughed at this, drunkenly. Like he had just heard a joke that would cause many to cringe at its’ crudeness but that he found absolutely delightful. His other hand came to her forearm, brushing it. She shivered.

“You were never good enough, never a good wife. But I thought it was just selfishness. It’s worse than that. It’s because you’re sick in the head.”

The fingers that had been on her neck pressed against her forehead, four different points of pressure against her skin. No sicker than an animal who beats his wife just to feel like a man. 

Suddenly Phillip grabbed Vivian by the arm, jerking her towards the three season room.

“Out! Get the fuck out!” 

He pushed her through the house, taking hold of her arm when she threatened to run. He dragged her through the dining room to the three season room, thrusting her out into the snow which crunched beneath her back as she slammed against the ground.

Vivian pulled herself up from the snow, covered in it.

“That dyke is a better man than you could ev-”

Vivian felt Philip’s fist strike her cheek with a strong jab and she fell to the ground. She recalled the protrusion coming from his fist; his wedding ring; as she felt the cold snap in her bones. Like red vessel fireworks, the blood pulled from Vivian’s lips in all directions from the blow.

The snow was red with the blood splattered and pulling from her lips. Vivian pulled herself up, packed a snowball against her lip like she had done during the Kansas winters of her childhood after getting in fights with the boys who called her a dyke. She grabbed her Emmy from the snow and the few pieces that mattered to her, her basic New Mexican blouses and a red bandana with blue and yellow flowers, and limped around the house. Thankfully she had her purse. She got into the Cadillac and pushed the key in the ignition. From the upstairs window, she could see Phil watching her with a fresh Scotch in his hand. She turned the key and put the car in reverse, feeling it grown in unison with herself as she left the house for the last time. 

* * *

The blood dripped down her cheek and chin, made an earthy red canal down her neck and was caught, finally, in the dam of her cotton neckline. The eye Philip had struck, her left, was nearly shut from the swelling, a blooming, bulging rose. The only thing that could cool her skin hot with forming bruises was the snow, melting now in the warm car, that shimmered in her tousled hair. And even as her heartbeat slammed against the skin of her cheek, thundered in her split lip, one thought, so unexpected and beautiful, was tranquily swimming in her mind.

Shay. She could now be with Shay. 

But doubts erupted like bombs in those deep waters. What if her pull was the danger? Like a bomb shelter, only desirable during those times when the ground shivered above.

When Vivian arrived at Shay’s apartment, she fell into her arms sobbing, telling her everything that happened. 

“Oh, Shay, I’m losing my mind!” she sobbed, “I have been since I was a young girl. He beat me yet I still blame myself, still feel like a whore. But who can blame him?” Vivian sobbed, “I cheated on him.”

“The first one to break your vows was him. And besides, you’re no longer his wife.”

“What are you talking about? We slept together!”

Shay took Vivian's face in her hands; held her close.

“The vows say to love, honor, and cherish. Do you really think that he’s kept the vows he took fifteen years ago to love you? Honor you? How has he cherished you, Vivian? Have you ever felt important to him as a human? He broke his vow to love you the moment he started hitting you. He broke his vow to honor you the moment he began harassing you over your career. And cherishing your spouse and stalking and accosting them are very different things.”

Shay nodded thoughtfully for a moment and stroked Viv’s cheeks.

“But I understand why you say that.” she continued, “I really do. I know it’s because the people who should have convinced you otherwise just pushed you closer to this…. But Vivian, you can’t always blame yourself for things outside of your control. It just doesn’t work that way. It can't work that way. It isn't right.”

“Don't you dare tell me what I can and can't do! You were going to be a lawyer! You were going to do something good with your life! Look at you! Falling in love with a second-rate actress, shaking from head to toe with withdrawal. Why why do you always chase after things that can't make you happy and turn from the things that will?” 

“You make me happy.” Shay whispered, “You’re my reason…” 

She stopped, her hands held out in front of her, extended in an invitation that Vivian refused. They weren’t finished. Shay understood. She ran her fingers across her lips as if feeling the curve of each letter she spoke to determine if it was right.

“…you’re the reason I want to be sober.”

“I can’t be your reason for anything. Don’t you understand that it’s like hurting me? You tie your sobriety to my love and you trust it to hold true but you don’t know how worn I am; how frayed the cords of my heart are from the strain of loving people so incapable of caring. It’s worn down… from all the heartbreak.” 

Vivian put a hand up to her lips, trembling, “I’m weak. I’ll break. And I don’t want to carry the weight of your drunkenness.”

Shay looked back with an expression of pure disappointment; disbelief. The worst part was how sincere it was. Vivian knew this was no act.

“My love hurts you?” Shay whispered weakly.

Her voice was like a phonograph played with a bamboo needle; unintelligible unless you were within a few inches of its source. It rasped with authentic emotion and a brave attempted to hold back tears. Vivian was unable to process it; the way her Shay, her tower of strength, like a wall between two warring cities within her that protected her but, like a child, she defiantly wished to scramble over, crumbled. Vivian desperately sought to take it back. But what could she say? Not because you give me pain, Vivian thought. It hurt more like when you carved your initials into the bark of a tree. The tree did not feel the puncture, and therefore there was no pain. But there was damage. The tree was forced to hemorrhage, pricked by your name; your memory now altering the shape of its future and, inadvertently, the shape of a whole wood, a tiny world, by your tramping through it. 

Vivian, poised as she always tried to be like a strong, earthy woman, had been altered by Shay. The bark, the exterior of control, had been sliced, purposely, and even now Vivian could look within herself and see, delicately yet heavily carved: Shay Emilia Dawson. She winced at the revelation. It felt, once again, that she belonged to someone. But she reminded herself that the tree that held the lover’s initials was not bound to their fate. It could stand tall even after heartbreak came and it would remain rooted in the earth after the lover’s hearts were uprooted from each other’s. Was that what Shay did for her? Had Shay taken her storm-battered limbs and tenderly held them and reset them so that she could one by stand tall regardless of the names and people that marked her? Was Vivian truly as chained as she felt, or were Philip’s words like knives seeking to claim every piece of her still? She didn’t know. And she still had not answered Shay, who finally broke the silence:

“You said that night, the night that I was the sickest from the withdrawal, that you always had faith in me; never doubted. That you trusted I could get better.” 

Vivian knew this was more question than statement. The inflection, the way she ran over the words faith; trust. She wanted to hear it, that Vivian indeed trusted. Vivian took an offshoot from the path laid by Shay’s words, a rabbit trail that she could use to hide the darker parts of the truth.

“It’s me I don’t have faith in, Shay.” Vivian finally choked, “I’m not strong enough to fix your drunkness.”

“You call it drunkenness? Why not withdrawal?” 

Shay looked heartbroken, but shook her head and whispered, “No, I… I understand. You doubt because you care. And you’re right, you shouldn’t be the reason I’m sober but what the hell other reason do I have? What other beauty in this world is there worth seeing through clear eyes? There is nothing else in this world that would keep me from the bottle. There is nothing else that I care about being here, I mean, really here for. If you left, I’d go right back to the bottle. I know it. I know… And it would be fine. That’s how I spent my entire life. I can take it. But how could you stand there and think for one minute that you’re not enough? To think that is… it’s…”

Shay stopped.

“You were going to say crazy.”

“Is it crazy to love someone?”

Vivian angry sobbing:

“No, but it’s crazy to love me. Don’t you see? The problem is with me. You can’t love me.”

Shay, her eyes red-rimmed, turned and walked to the door.

“Shay… Please, W-”

The door shut behind her. It did not echo, nor was it slammed in anger, it was simply closed off solemnly, surely. Vivian watched the cord stretch, become taut as Shay pulled open the door. The connection was obviously strained, being tried, but it did not break when Shay pulled the apartment door closed behind her.

This was a pivotal moment.

Vivian lay her hand on the connection, felt it tremble lightly. It was cool against the heat of her anger, like a green lake in summer. She hooked it with a finger and carefully tugged it. The connection felt strong, its’ fibers many and interconnected. She studied them for a moment: the fibers of heartbreak, the fibers of childhoods haunted, of mothers suddenly absent and crushing self-hatred; of life seen as meaningless, of love always elusive, of tragedy always two steps behind any joy. Vivian noticed how the fibers of heartbreak and self-hatred weaved together more tightly, while childhood ghosts clung to the absent mothers. 

And suddenly, angrily, Vivian grabbed hold of the connection and pulled hard, attempting to sever it. It held true. And the realization came to Vivian suddenly that perhaps it would never break; had never been meant to. This realization made her pause. She held to the connection, shivering. Even with her knuckles still white around the cord, she did not attempt to sever it again. Slowly, she let her hands drop to her sides. 

And her eyes remained on the door long after Shay had left.

She contemplated what it all meant.

Since before Vivian had even been made aware of how love and passion worked, (her family had never discussed these things outright, but disguised them with Pseudonym and perceivably innocent glances,) she had felt within herself a dark spot. Nothing physical, you understand, for it was very different from a heart murmur or a pinched nerve… And yet it felt the same: incorrect; infected. Like some speck of emotional dust had floated into her eyes, blurring the landscape of love and making it impossible to navigate. Parched and anxious she had wandered through love affairs that could not satisfy her need for replenishment. For they were mere mirages; hallucinations of a soul starving for authenticity and warmth. She had staggered through life with a look of want always in her eyes. This was what made her such an amazing actress: that constant and all-consuming need. And acting was yet another apparition of love. The audience latched onto you like children but grew up when the curtains closed and went on without needing you. Love. Real love… that was a hopeless mission, like emptying the ocean with a thimble. 

The mark, really, was a mark of bad luck. And since the mark was on her soul’s mouth, the heart, it brought about calamity in love. Her heart’s blemish had been the cause of three broken marriages and a dozen more cut off love affairs. Always, it seemed, when Vivian’s heart experienced a cord of finely tuned connection with another, the fibers of love and affection were always cut short; severed. Even the silken ribbon connecting her to Florence had been torn long ago. Even there had been times when her hands had gripped the two pieces of the severed connection and attempted to weave them together again. She couldn’t even remember a single instance when the connection by its’ strength alone had held true. And yet, she trembled, this connection seemed that it could outlive all the others--maybe. But could she, by her strength alone, determined and white-knuckled, hold on to it? 

They were both being bitter.

It was a puzzle where each piece had a hollow and a protrusion. The shallowest parts of her fit with the most outwardly extended parts of Shay; where Shay's concave pride was reached by Vivian's own compassion. And so it went: petty, shallow pride and loving outstretched love, piece by piece, till both truly saw what they were angry at. And it wasn’t anything that was under either of their control. And it wasn’t over degrees or inches of film or applause or textbooks.

But suddenly something in the back of Vivian’s mind beaconed her. Doubt. The truth was, she did have doubts about Shay’s ability to refrain from the bottle. She doubted what Shay said, about her love for Vivian being enough to keep her sober. But she doubted love was enough only because she hoped it could possibly be enough; somehow be adequate. That she could somehow be adequate…Perhaps it was seeing Phil’s drunk frame in the doorway of her home, but she needed to be sure Shay wasn’t drinking anymore.

Vivian walked over to the drawer slowly. Her body shifts as she walked, like a shadow, her feet making full impressions in the stained carpet with each step. Vivian could tell that the drawer was pulled back an inch, but not enough to be looked into. She took the handle, whispered a curse, and pulled it open.

The kelly green necktie Shay had worn the day they meet was folded and neatly tucked between two equally brightly colored ties. These were in the far left corner of the drawer. Pressed against these were pairs of socks; suspenders and a tiny cloth bag with tarnished cufflinks with tiny lavender stones sitting in the silver molds.

No alcohol.

Just then, Vivian heard the key in the lock. She shoved clothes back in place and shut the drawer. When the door opened, Vivian’s hand was still resting on the handle of the bottom drawer.

“Shay, I’m so sorry.”

Shay raised a hand, “It’s…”

She was going to say it was fine. Vivian knew it wasn’t. 

“You’re right about my being a lawyer.” Shay whispered after closing the sock drawer, “I never should have accepted the death of the dream.”

“It was nasty of me to bring it up. It was a dirty punch and I’m sorry for taking it.”

Shay shook her head and sighed. Her hands were on her hips, her posture small and bent. She ran a shaking hand over the back of her head. 

“It doesn’t matter… I wasn’t thinking about that when I was out, anyway. I was thinking about what you said after that, about how you’re second-rate. The way you said it.

There was something in your tone. I felt…”

Shay touched her lips with shaking fingers, “It seemed like you weren’t talking about acting or even your career. You weren’t downplaying your talents at all… You were calling yourself second-rate, weren’t you?”

Vivian didn’t speak. Shay just shook her head, sad and bewildered.

“But Vivian, you aren’t second-rate. Don’t you see that? You shouldn’t think that you are. Not on the stage and not in life.”

Shay shook her head, “If you’re crazy, Vivian Roberta, I think the whole world should be too. I just can’t imagine a better kind of insanity than ours.” And she kissed her, “You aren’t losing your mind. Your mind is as tethered to reality as anyone’s can be. That’s why you hurt as bad as you do. You can’t avoid understanding what you do, Vivian, because you understand a great deal and to know so much about the dark blots that mark this world is a very devastating thing. Because only those who have experienced the worst of this world can truly understand it.”

“But the dark blots aren’t on the world,” Vivian cried, “They're on me. You can’t know that I’m telling the truth the same way that I can’t prove to you that he hurt me and I can’t even prove to myself that it happened. In my head, I hear those voices as if their people speaking on the radio and even with the static I know what they tell me. They tell me I’m crazy, Shay. And they tell me you need to leave before I hurt you the way I’ve hurt myself, the way I’ve hurt Philip. They say you should leave me so you have to!” Vivian was fighting Shay’s warm arms as they clung to her, “Leave me! Just go away before it’s too late!”

“No! Vivian, I will not be another instance in your life you can use to justify your opinion of yourself! I won’t leave you!” Shay wrapped Vivian up, forced her to sit down on the couch, “Haven’t you realized by now I can’t leave you? Haven’t you realized now why that is?”

Shay was holding Vivian’s wrists in her hands. When Vivian looked down, she saw that Shay’s knuckles were pink from restraining her, while her own were white with fear. Shay followed her gaze, and her eyes immediately filled with tears and she loosened her grip and released Vivian’s wrists. Shay sucked in a shaky breath, shook her head. Shay wasn’t that person. She wouldn’t make Vivian stay, or even face what her ex-spouse truly was. She just loved Vivian too much to let her believe any longer these lies that had ground themselves into her skull. How else could she show this woman the truth other than the lump of glittering limitlessness in Shay’s pocket? She hadn’t planned for it to be this way. She hadn’t wanted anything to tarnish this time when it came...

Shay pulled the ring from her pocket, “It’s nothing like what you deserve, but I spent everything I could on it.”

“Shay… We can’t get married.”

“In a world where we can’t exist in the open, our marriage will be a deeply beautiful secret. I don’t need anyone’s permission to marry you other than yours, Vivian Roberta. It’s your choice.”

“It isn’t logical…”

“What’s so logical about loving someone, Vivi? You have to be crazy to fall in love, don’t you? The way I feel about you, I’m crazy as all get out.”

Shay pressed a kiss, a desperate morse code pattern of lips and heat and lust and compassion, on Vivian’s mouth, “I love you to the sanitorium and back.”

She whispered huskily. Vivian laughed, though the sound was painful. But the pain shattered and before Vivian knew it, she was in Shay’s arms. 

Shay’s breath was against Vivian’s ear; the sensations that feeling gave her were like flying down a desert highway, hot and unstoppable. They were unstoppable. They were a deformed kind of love that spread and contaminated the whole damn society around them. They were a virus that you wanted to die from, a car accident you wished you had been in, a knowing Romeo and Juliet who had no qualms with their eventual doom. And as Shay’s hot kisses trailed down Vivian’s neck, her collarbones, breasts, hips, Vivian was reminded of the fires of hell. How could the same fire that was ignited in Vivian’s heart the night Shay saved her be kin to the fires she was doomed for? Could heaven and Hell be so similar in climate? Both so hot and unquenchable and earnest? Could they be so interchangeable, heaven and hell? One thing was certain to Vivian, whether damned or redeemed, she would be with Shay for the rest of her existence. If heaven was real, and it could separate them, Vivian would side with the demons if she had to. She would charm the devil himself if it meant that she could have Shay for eternity and then some. She would side with the hated things, the evil things, the sick things. She would become something inhuman if only to receive one final chance at the most lovely thing that could ever be: true love in all its hopelessness. Because this was a hopeless, hopeless thing, the unstoppable love she and Shay had for each other, hopeless and naive. And so complete. How on earth could all those couples out their settle for their pseudo soulmates? Were they so broken that they had given up, as she had before, on true love? This thought made Vivian press herself closer to Shay as she helped work off Shay’s layers. 

This was the most complete collection ever assembled: Passion, true love, lust, and grace. How could someone settle for less? What made so many others accept just one or two of three of these? As Vivian’s body responded to her true love’s touches, she forgot those pitiful creatures with their pseudo loves. No one else existed. 

“I know you're afraid.” Shay whispered, “But he will never touch you again. Never.”

Vivian looked up at her. God, she was beautiful, the kind of beauty that locked you up inside and made you spin.

Shay took Viv’s hand, stroked her fingers. It was a silent reassurance. Take it off, Vivian Roberta, throw him away. Like cutting stitches from a wound, Vivian slipped the ring off her finger.

“I’m yours,” Vivian whispered.

Shay shook her head, taking Vivian’s face in her hands.

“You don’t belong to anyone, Vivian Roberta.”

Shay took Vivian's chin in her hand lightly and kissed her.

Their bodies were warm, Vivian knew she would always remember that. And as the sun died behind the shades, Vivian realized this was the first time in her life she felt loved. It was there, against the cold walls of the flat and Shay's body like melting chocolate that Vivian learned the true definition of reality: Nothing but sweetness. When her entire life had been like the powdered stuff, love had poured over her like whole milk.

They lay together, half in sleep, until Vivian finally mentioned what she had been keeping from her love because of the fear of rejection, a fear she no longer had. 

“Shay, John has asked me to marry him.”

“...if that's what you want.”

Vivian held Shay tighter, “It isn't what I want. It's what I have to do.”

Shay looked into Vivian’s eyes and noticed that one of her cuts had started bleeding again. She immediately got up and brought iodine from the bathroom to clean her wounds.

The iodine colored Vivian’s skin a raspberry pink. Shay watched the pink trail that ran down the skin of her cheek and forehead. She was the color of flowers; purple petals around her eyes, pink stems. Shay knew that Vivian’s heart was the same colors.

“Will he leave you alone if you’re married?”

Vivian shut her eyes, laid her head back down on Shay’s shoulder.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, “But we can’t go on like this.”

Shay kissed her forehead, everything in her on fire for this woman and unwaveringly confident in one thing: Vivian had to be protected.

“No, we can’t go on like this. So, Vivian, I give you my blessing. Marry John. Because what matters most to me is that you’re safe and happy, finally.” Shay felt tears slip down her cheeks in the darkness, “Marry John because he can take care of you because maybe that’s something I can’t give you. Marry him because it's your choice to and maybe it’s the right thing.” Shay’s last whispered thoughts of the night were disjointed, cold and wet as if she had been caught alone in a rainstorm:

“It will be okay.”

But when Shay turned over to look at her love, Vivian had fallen asleep.


	15. “Champagne, for everyone!”

March 3, 1966 - The Silk Corner Club

The night that Bill Frawley died, Vivian heard of it while at The Silk Corner with Shay and John.

“Champagne, for everyone!” She said excitedly and poured herself another glass. 

“Slow down, baby,” Shay whispered. 

“Shut up!” Vivian screamed, pushing Shay away from her, “You don’t know what that was like! That man… he nearly… just like my ex-husband.”

And Vivian broke down into sobs. Shay watched her sink to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself as if Bill was with her all over again; as if Philip was there.

Shay sank to the floor next to her, gently taking her chin in her hands. Her eyes were serious.

“What do you mean: ‘Just like your ex-husband?’” 

“I thought you k-knew.” Vivian sobbed.

Shay stood up… Vivian could have sworn she could see that day playing out in Shay’s eyes, the day Vivian had been attacked by Bill and the day Vivian came to her bloodied and beaten seemed to converge like a drug-induced nightmare. And something must have clicked then for Shay. 

Rape. Two men had nearly raped her. And God only knew all that Philip had done to her while they were married.

“You never really left Philip, did you?” Shay said as tears swelled in the corners of her eyes, ”He never let you. God, you never had a chance, did you?”

“I knew what would have happened if I h-had.” Vivian said through sobs, “He would have kept f-forcing himself on me.”

And that’s what did Shay in. That was what made her collapse next to Vivian and sob beside her; the charade of stony strength and courage cracking. Kept forcing… Kept, as in continued. God, Shay thought in circles, what have you allowed to happen to her? Dear Jesus, what is the point of all of this pain and injustice you put us through? Where does it take us? What paradise out there can truly be worth this? Shay was shaking now, but not from a lack of liquor. At least that demon had gone silent. But it seemed that an army had come to take its’ place.

“My analyst told me that anything that you felt you had to be; joyful, comedic, kind, even if it was something really wonderful like that, that it could feel like a prison if you didn’t have a choice in being it. I think I realize now what he meant. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in love with Philip. It wasn't even that I wasn’t attracted to him. It’s that he didn’t give me a choice.” Vivian looked Shay in the eyes, “Shay, I had to love him. I needed to do something to convince myself that he wasn’t really all that terrible. I had to do something. So I loved him. And I was loyal to him. I worshiped the bastard. I did anything that would make it stop, even if only for a small moment of time. That’s what Philip did to me. That’s why he made me feel like I was constantly cracking up like I was losing my mind: He turned love into a prison.” Vivian touched Shay’s cheeks, a desperate warmth on her fingertips, “Shay, I love you. I love you because you gave me the choice to love you. But I was afraid of him… so I couldn't be loyal to you the way you deserved. Please don’t hate me. Please, please don’t.” 

That night, Shay’s heart broke. Not in the way you hear about when you are betrayed by a lover, or called some nasty name by someone you thought respected you and loved you dearly. This kind of heartbreak was the kind that took everything, from birth to death, and weighed it, felt it as if it were fresh this moment, and then decided that God, or Gods, or Goddesses, or Mother Nature was not as loving and justice is driven as you had thought. Shay felt betrayed by the universe, by every speck of dust and dirt and light and grass that ever existed. All of it had let her and her love down. The very fabric of the world had ceased to support them and down they fell, it seemed, into the fiery core of everything to melt away. Shay decided then that if the universe and whatever being ruled it didn’t care about them, then they would care about themselves. And if they now had to construct their own little universe, Vivian was the sun that Shay would orbit forever.

While the rest of their party celebrated with fine wine and friends, Shay and Vivian held each other on the liquor stained floor of the coat room, nursing their own tragedies, the furs, and fabrics sheltering them like fugitives amongst the pines. Through her tears, Shay whispered to her:

“Did I keep my promise?”

Vivian looked up at her, “What do you mean?”

“I told you he would never touch you again. I told you I would protect you.” A silver tear slid down Shay’s cheek, “Did I keep my promise? Has he hurt you since?”

“Only in my nightmares.”

And the two stayed on the floor till midnight; champagne and liquor creating tides in the tile and mingling with their tears. When they reached Shay’s flat early the next morning, Shay led Viv to bed and laid with her. It was an innocent, loving caress; two bodies melting into each other till they could sense everything the other was feeling. And when Vivian’s nightmares raged, Vivian’s stagehand saint was there to protect her.

“Shay, why did you save me that night?”

“I already told you, my darling, but I'll tell you again, this time differently: love is not a transaction. Flowers do not grow to profit, but to love.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the flower of Albuquerque exists to be loved and appreciated. And you don't need to do anything, just exist, in order to deserve love and respect. And I couldn't let that man crush your petals and uproot you.”

“Such a poet.” Vivian whispered through her tears, “I wonder where you get your muse.”

Vivian met Shay’s eye, those riverbed-slate wonders, stars in a muddy sky, and realized that Shay looked older than she did on the night they had met. Five years had passed since then. In those five years, a love had bloomed between two people, a love forbidden, a love cherished and worth every risk. Each soft indent in Shay’s cheeks was like the hands of a clock ticking onward, deeper, claiming more of the freshness that was once there. Shay’s eyes were greyer, her hands thinner. Her hair was streaked with a satiny grey.

But the grin; that would always remain the same.

It was nights like tonight when the two lovers remembered the cruelty of time, what it stole and took no ransom for. It took away naivety and the soft acceptance that life was forever. 

In 1973, they were both to realize in the cruelest of ways that nothing, no matter how perfect, was for forever. 

In 1973, Vivian was diagnosed with cancer.

And that night in ‘73, with Vivian’s hand cold against the porcelain of the wall phone as the news settled in her like shrapnel, Shay sunk down and held her as she had done then, and softly cried.

“This will not uproot you,” Shay whispered to the thinning hair. 

“I will love you through this.” She whispered to papery wrists.

“I will be here. I won’t leave you alone with this.” She told the thin arms.

“We’ll fight it together.”

“We will see the best doctors.”

“I will take care of you.”

“I love you.”

I love you.  
I love you.  
I love you.

 

But isn't it so true… that in the end, love is never enough?


	16. Half the world dissolves...

August 17, 1979 - Vivian Vance’s Home in Belvedere, CA

August in California was like a crackling fire of newspapers and citrus. There were the blue oceans caped white like Lux soup and fierce desert colors of deep green and pink and blood orange. Fires like cats tails were billowing in counties estranged from the sea. Death and Life were fighting with the grace of an experienced dancer across The Golden State. Death and life; fire and water… It seemed an appropriate place to Lucille Ball for Vivian to settle; a woman now dying of cancer.

Death was not something Ms. Ball was naive of. Her own father had died of typhoid fever on a couch in her childhood home when she was less than four years old. Her mother, with her voice dishrag textured, had told the young girl that her father had died on a cold morning. The sparrows flew, birds that had not yet left the state, and sorrowfully sang outside the window of a house filled with death. Lucille had hated birds ever since. She wasn’t so keen on seeing people on the verge of mortality either.

In fact, Lucille wasn’t afraid of death or what a human fungus like cancer could do, as much as she was scared that things would change and that there was now no excuse for using the defenses she had always relied on so heavily: coldness, confidence, and logic. There was no acceptable way of … To be anything other than speechless would have been a slap in the face to the dying woman. But anyone who knew Lucille knew she would never admit it. That's why Mary Wickes, Lucille’s new comedy cohort on ‘Here’s Lucy!’ had decided to come along. Not to give outright support, which would have been rejected, but to give health and life the advantage. It was two to one now. Life had the upper hand.

As the driver stopped the car at a tan, stucco house, as modest as it was lovely, Lucy put on one last smear of makeup and Mary one last brave face. Both were necessary to hide the truth: they were scared out of their wits to see death.

“It won’t be long.” Lucille spoke as she undid her seatbelt, “Keep the car running.”

The two women walked up to the screen door of the home. The main door was open and a cool breeze came out to meet them through the screen. Lucille knocked on the door.  
John was the first one to peer around the corner before pulling himself up from his favorite reading chair to0 open the screen.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered when he reached the door.

Mary’s heart pounded as she stood on the stoop, motionless. Dear God… Had they been too late?

“She gone?” Lucille asked with a tone like gravel; hard yet shifting.

John shook his head slowly, his cool, logical ways so cold and awkward; unfitting to the scene. He didn’t look upset, or even worried, just sure.

“No… No, not that.” he whispered, “But she isn’t good, Lucille. She’s not going to hold on more than another month.”

Mary’s eyes shifted back from John to Lucille. And she watched as Lucille, in her typical fashion, invited herself in and pulled open the screen door. She walked straight passed John, not even asking to be shown to Viv’s room. Lucille wouldn’t look or speak to the man the rest of the evening.

Mary followed Lucy like a young child as the redhead glided through the house, trying doors, turning corners. John knew better than to tell Lucy where Viv was.

If the script had called for Lucille to tell Vivian she looked a little pekid, this would have been met by a roar of guilty pleasure from the audience, a wicked laughter that relished the dark wit of this comedy turned tragedy. There would have been a biting of tongues, and a ‘Dear God, why am I laughing?’ from rows A to G and a sharp inhale of breath by those snobs who refused the delicate and tactful joke that they were witness to. They would have been as red in the face as Vivian was white and pale; dying from laughter as Vivian, in a much less humorous way, was dying from cancer. And their hearts would have been as full of mirth as Vivian’s was stripped of it. Because life was too beautiful, damn it, and death was closing the curtain.

Lucille said, “We wasted a lot of time, didn’t we?”

Vivian lay on the bed as if carved into it; a statue of marble entitled ‘Woman dying.’

“Maybe we were just too similar.” she croaked, “Maybe we had both been chasing the same thing. Success seems like fool's gold in a stream now but then, it was everything. And maybe, in the end, there was only one souvenir. And it wasn’t success, or ratings, or even an Emmy. It was people. It was memories. It’s like something out of a hope chest.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Lucille turned back around to face Viv.

“I never told you this but, Vivian, it was Shay who told me to tell you to divorce Philip.”

“She didn’t even know me at the time.”

As Lucille left, she turned, “She loved you long before you even knew it. I think she waited for you, Viv. I just hope you understand that.”

With this, Lucille gathered herself and walked towards the door, Mary reluctantly accepting that this was it, the finale. Why would Lucille leave now? Mary wanted to grab the redhead by the roots and force her back into Vivian’s room to say all that had been left unsaid, crossed out on the script if Lucy and Viv’s friendship. But in the end, the two left without even hesitating.

Three weeks later, Shay stepped out of the room and locked eyes with John, her knees weak.

“Exit stage right.” She whimpered, “Curtains closed for good.”

And Shay collapsed into sobs.

 


	17. I love you, Vivian Roberta

Shay,

I can’t write anymore. I can’t use my hands to hold this pencil and I can’t breathe or eat. But you deserve to know that I’m trying. I’m trying for you. 

It was you, Shay. You were what I was always trying to find, what the characters I played on stage always seemed to have: a lighthearted look at life, the ability to ignore their own pain and make light off it. I searched for happiness, convinced it was hidden in the footnotes of all those comedy scripts. And strangely, I started to become angered by it all. Life in its entirety seemed to be nothing more than some sick sitcom, its’ writers a twisted and lewd clan who enjoyed torturing their characters’ hearts with love affairs that that had flashing above them a neon sign reading ‘No Vacancy.’ It was all a fictitious kind of placidity; a meaningless religion. Everything around me seemed to be parched of meaning, yet drowning in confusion. There seemed to be no point in living, yet taking each breath that I did seemed like some monumental achievement. And one morning, I woke up to find the walls closing in around me. I fell out of bed, the sheets wrapped around my naked body and I glanced out the white shuttered windows, watching as morning lept onto the world. The sun was a bright, frying egg yolk; the sky some kind of technicolor blue and crystal clear. Even the grass was a lush green and the orchids I had planted undeniably gorgeous. Around me, the world bubbled with perfection. It made the contrast that much more difficult for me to fathom. The world buzzed with confident beauty, and there I sat; a sinful and unassured soul; kicked back and forth inside myself like an old tin can.

That was life before you, Shay. That was life without you.

It isn't every play that is written with a happy ending. And this one is no exception. I’m dying, Shay. And by the time you read this letter, that statement will be in the past tense.   
It has been something beautiful, my love. You found me. You loved me. Sometimes, things just come together. And there was no evidence that it would be so beautiful. But it’s like having a fire inside you while the rest of the world is in a hail storm. I don’t know… but I didn’t think I ever deserved to be happy. I can’t thank you enough for proving me wrong.

I hope one day you can forgive me for abandoning you, my love. But even if you can, I’ll never forgive myself.

You are my reason, Shay, my reason for everything.

I love you,   
Vivian Roberta


	18. How can you knock it?

A year later, Shay Dawson passed away. 

She had suffered a heart attack and was raced to the hospital by the trombone player at the  _ Silk Corner.  _

As the city sped by, Shay’s head resting against the car door, she felt a shock of originality, a tightening of awareness that nearly matched that tightness in her chest. And as the city passed by her, those unbelievable metal mountains that she had sworn she would climb before her life was done, she heard a sound. It was a constant strike of a tiny bell; a steady beating against a brass doorknob.

It was Vivian’s watch; a tiny silver thing that Vivian had latched with shaking fingers around Shay’s wrist before she passed. Shay smiled as she heard it; closed her eyes. 

_ Two blocks before they reached the hospital, it stopped ticking. _

Shay was cremated, her ashes scattered at sea like Vivian’s before her. 

Upon hearing of Shay’s death, Lucille had written a letter to John Dodd. 

“I only hope their souls find each other again amongst the waves.” it read, “For a love like theirs could have set the whole ocean ablaze.” 

* * *

February 11, 1980 People Magazine Interview with Lucille Ball

Suddenly, during an interview for People Magazine, as if a premonition of what was to come soon, Lucille remembered what Vivian had said to her the last time she had visited her: “She calls me Vivian Roberta, because she knows I forgot things and she never wanted me to feel embarrassed around her.”

What love, Lucille thought, what concern that even a name should be said to comfort another.

And she knew Shay would read this.

Shay. Lucille had the uncanny feeling that she was doing this interview for Shay. And Lucille realized that she, in fact, owed Shay this. Didn't she? In some way, she had to show Shay that Lucille truly believed that their love for Vivian had been legitimate. Not just Lucille, but the world. The world had to know that it was real. Somehow…

With tears in her eyes, Lucille answered the interviewer, who had just asked her what she thought of gay love,

“It’s perfectly alright with me.” she answered, “Some of the most gifted people I’ve ever met or read about are homosexual. How can you knock it?”


	19. Conclusion

CONCLUSION:  
...BUT WHY VIVIAN VANCE?

  
In the I Love Lucy episode Ethel’s Hometown, where, on a pitstop on their way to Hollywood, the Ricardo's and Mertzes visit Ethel’s hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico it is discovered that Ethel has misled people back home into thinking she has finally made it big. Ethel decides to perform for the people of her hometown under the guise of success and Fred, Lucy, and Ricky playfully sabotages her. It is in this episode that we discover Ethel’s full maiden name: Ethel Mae Potter.

  
Vivian Vance’s real mother, “a disapproving, frustrated, and aggravating woman,” (Quote from Lou Ann Graham, Castelluccio, 31) was named Euphemia Mae Ragan, but went simply by Mae. Mae, like her daughter, had possessed an unquenchable desire to act and perform, but after losing her singing voice due to the incorrect methods of a vocal teacher, partially losing her hearing, and having absolutely no one in her family support her dreams to become a performer, Mae began to vengefully and violently deprecate all things and people involved in show business. Eventually, even, her own daughter. Vivian’s relationship with Mae was one of constant tension, and Vivian was often an outlet for Mae to let out her hurt and dissatisfaction with life.

  
Regardless of her childhood pains (or perhaps because of them), Vivian gave tribute to her mother and, no doubt, her mother’s unfulfilled dreams, in a very subtle, sweet and intuitive way by having the writers of I Love Lucy use her name. In this episode, a banner is put up by the people of Albuquerque which reads: Ethel Mae Potter! We never forgot her!

  
...of all the reasons one would have to write a beautiful love story, it doesn’t seem that skin deep attraction should be one of them. But it is. Vivian Vance was an incredibly attractive woman and it often burned her to know that she was seen as a frumpy bleach blonde landlady with an ‘old goat’ of a husband. Vivian felt she was a glamour girl and had earned her little-known nickname: ‘The Flower Of Albuquerque.’ She often let (and encouraged) people to stare at her because she saw it as a compliment. In her real life, Vivian Vance was an Olive Thomas in both color and sound; a work of art that went from revolutionary to classic, and never out of style.

  
Vivian Vance was a little-known shadow compared to Ethel Mertz. And Viv’s frustrations about this came out often. “When I die,” Vivian once commented, “there will be people who send flowers to Ethel Mertz.” When I first read this, I believed that this was meant to convey that Vivian Vance was so incredibly talented that she would be remembered as a piece of TV history. Now, I realize that what she was trying to convey was how dehumanized she felt by being more readily recognized as a figment of comedy than a human being. This story is my clumsy but well-meaning attempt to show the human side of Vivian’s story and to change the grave marker of “Ethel Mertz” to one that more readily defines Vivian Vance, such as “Courageous Woman,” “Lifelong Fighter,” “Kind and troubled soul.”

  
In Vivian’s biography it is said that: “Near the end of her life, Vivian came to terms with her existence, finally concluding a journey filled with contradictions.” (28) Vivian shared her life with other people through a set of well calculated and kindly spoken lies. There is nothing pathological about it the way I see it. She was trying to protect herself, others, especially her own sanity. Vivian’s ability to remain humorous, laid against a background of pain, self-medicating, confusion, is truly fascinating.   
When I look at Vivian Vance, someone who often lied to herself and others in order to avoid hard feelings, who spent too much of life trying to fit into a society that wasn’t ready for her splendor and zest, I see the potential for her to be queer. Obviously, I read some of my own identity into her as a character, but I believe there is also some objective facts to back this up. Comments such as these at the very least raise suspicions:

“I had some marvelous, close girlfriends… but nobody gossiped about that.”

“‘...Men and marriage didn’t seem important to [Vivian], only as a means to an end.’”

And lastly, in a way, I am also trying to show the human side of someone I once loved so much, I was willing to mutilate my body for them. This person, a young, flaxen-haired and aqua eyed girl who moved like the wind and spoke with a voice that could sing so beautifully but cut you like a trident, was my life for two years. She was an actress, singer, child, adult, friend, enemy; never a lover... as I had hoped for…

  
During the span of our friendship, I developed mental health issues and began abusing my body horribly. I lost all interest in people, lied and stole money, made life-threatening risks with no concern for tomorrow. She was fighting her own demons and standing on the shaking ground of her parents’ crumbling marriage. But she always appeared so happy, and only on one occasion did she ever lash out at me. And I loved her, oh God how I loved her. And if to know someone is to love them, than I must have known this person, during those two years, better than anyone else.

  
They say that stage-people are their own breed, wild and lovely and heartless and yet constantly yearning to be loved. That was the way of this girl, this young woman I loved and (shamefully, I admit now) worshiped. Vivian was also of this breed, and through remembering my time with my one-sided lover, I was able to fill in certain unknowable aspects of Vivian’s personality with those of her distant stage kin.

  
A Flower with Lavender Petals is the card I have attached to a metaphorical bouquet, the flowers that belong on Vivian Vance’s grave and not Ethel Mertz’s. And what is a card without a dedication? So here:

To Vivian Roberta Jones,   
Your life was a tragic comedy. And you were a leading lady that deserved another chance at a great love scene. So, to the Flower of Albuquerque, glamour girl of the Vaudeville stage and saint in stage makeup: This is for you. For your sweat and pain and heartbreak. For your visibility and your healing. Today and then, you are human always.

Much, much love,  
an understanding soul and unknown friend

P.S. - People remember.


End file.
